"Brightness Falls From the Air"

“Brightness falls from the air.” 

That’s what came to mind when I heard of the 5,000 birds—red-winged blackbirds, grackles, starlings—fallen dead in Beebe, Arkansas and Louisiana. The line is from Thomas Nashe’s “Litany in Time of Plague.”  The 16^th  century poet might not think of apocalypse and doom in contemporary “eco” terms, but his line is apt for the mysterious death of the birds.

Any mass death is disturbing because it suggests destruction of order—environmental, political, or moral. So far the explanations lean toward large flocks panicking at New Year’s fireworks. Stories in The New York TImes and Christian Science Monitor display the unexpected litter of small corpses. Some of the bird species are unwanted imports like the starlings. (Yes, poetry can be blamed for that since someone wanted the birds named by another 16^th century writer, Shakespeare to grace the New World.) Others like the red-winged blackbirds are considered pests by many agricultural managers. (You can read of government agency pitted against government agency over the redwing at an education website, "Journey North".) To me, they’re a marker--I know when the males arrive in Minnesota, even if it snows the next day, spring will not be deterred. Still, to see so many fallen from the sky. . . it must be sad and disturbing to stand among them.

Of course there’s Hitchcock’s The Birds in which tables are turned and the animals inexplicably, it seems, turn against the humans. It was released in 1963, coincidentally not long after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring appeared in The New Yorker.  Hitchcock was out for terror, not environmental enlightenment. But if you haven’t seen Alfred’s mock-sweet trailer about how kind we are to our “good friends the birds, it’s worth it. Given today’s taste, he would make a movie about zombie birds. 

Except wouldn’t we be the zombies? The ones who no longer get how life works and destroy others for no reason, not even conscious that we destroy?

The image above is, as many will recognize, John James Audubon's.