always quite grey and dark-- in the darkness one
sees the plum trees and magnolia trees shining--but
this year is colder, and the greyness is more tenacious,
the cloudy days longer.
Today, though, we have a sunny, spring-like day.
But it's strangely quiet. Usually all the birds gather
around the house, chirping from early in the morning
and eating the camellia buds and dropping some of
them to the ground. But this year, the bigger birds are
observed, but the smaller birds are few, including
sparrows. We haven't heard the uguisu, the Japanese
nightingale, or bush warbler. According to Wikipedia,
it starts chirping from the beginning of February
and usually gives news of spring...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=fvwp&v=zfmraoicGKY
Neither have we seen or heard the mejiro, the Japanese
white-eye bird...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfg-7wacKv0
Rachel Carson, marine biologist and author who
"loved all forms of wildlife and treasured the environment,"
once described (in her book Silent Spring, written while
she had cancer) the “chains of devastation” (referring to
the death of robins as a result of a program to spray elm trees
with pesticides) when we lose small animals and songbirds.
The book's title, inspired by Keats' ""The sedge is wither'd
from the lake, And no birds sing," pertains here in our
little town of Kamakura, where incoming spring seems
silent indeed. It's not the kind of situation one wants to
get used to.
 |
| Rachel Carson (1907-1964) |
This post sounds like a haunting echo of a story by Tokyo-based reporter David McNeill that appeared in the Irish Times last month (“Bird life badly hit by nuclear fallout in Japan” @ http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2012/0203/1224311175735.html). In his article McNeill writes that “Researchers working in the irradiated zone around the disabled Fukushima nuclear plant say bird populations there have begun to dwindle, in what may be a chilling harbinger of the impact of radioactive fallout on local life…” If what they say is true, I hope that the Kamakura cousins of Fukushima’s birds are still just enjoying the warmer climates of wherever they migrated and will be back to break the silence some time soon.
ReplyDeleteJim Carrier's chapter, "Voiceless Victims" in "Learning to Glow: a nuclear reader" starts with "The animals were always the first to know. Spadefoot toads that came out to breed in the rain early July 16, 1945, were evaporated by the Trinity explosion...
ReplyDeleteAs early as 1949, the lowly jackrabbit was recognized by the Atomic Energy Commission as a "reliable indicator" of radioactive contaminants...
In the Columbia River downstream from the nuclear reactors of Hanford, Washington, algae, plankton and insects began accumulating radionuclides at the rate of 2 to 3 curies per mile of riverbed. As a result, birds and fish accumulated radioactive concentration thousands of that of the river...Salmon, whitefish and shellfish became radioactive..."
Svetlana Alexievich also pays attention to wildlife in her soulful book, "Voices from Chernobyl. Excerpt at "The Paris Review" (http://www.theparisreview.org/letters-essays/5447/voices-from-chernobyl-svetlana-alexievich)
"The chickens had black coxcombs, not red ones, because of the radiation. And you couldn’t make cheese. We lived a month without cheese and cottage cheese. The milk didn’t go sour—it curdled into powder, white powder. Because of the radiation."
Thank you for this sensitive post. I volunteered with a wild bird rehabilitator. We could not do anything for the many birds that came to us poisoned by lawn and garden pesticides, ingested by eating poisoned insects or rodents in the case of birds of prey. The rehabilitator, a spiritual Scottish woman, said the birds came to us so that we would be with them as they died, always convulsing. She would inject them with pain medication to ease their suffering and hasten their demise.
I have wondered, if in the case of nuclear radiation, the birds might sense it, and migrate to another place. But this does not appear to be the case, according to Jim Carrier's essay in "Learning to Glow."
I can't imagine spring in Japan w/out the liquid cries of the uguisu. I simply can't.
ReplyDeleteAlan, you may want to read this description of Kathleen Flenniken's second collection PLUME, just out from University of Washington Press.
http://www.kathleenflenniken.com/plume.html