If Robins Could Sing

Bickering gluttons, black-oil sunflower and Silent Spring

The black-headed grosbeaks were a little late this year, but they made up for their tardiness with their numbers. My yard is besieged with overdressed, chubby, bickering gluttons - and I love it.

They adore black oil sunflower seed and at the beginning of April, every year, I provide an all-you-can-eat buffet. The vast majority of them breed further north. They only descend on my house for a few weeks. Yet, they always stop. They are a ritual that celebrates a waking prolific world. And they are a reminder of the comforting churn of nature’s never ending cycles.

This year the grosbeaks arrived just in time for Earth Day and I found myself contemplating a world entirely without them. Rachael Carson’s Silent Spring was the impetus for this celebration of our planet, along with the Environmental Protection Agency, the Migratory Bird Act, and the banning of DDT. Carson imagined a spring devoid of birdsong or even the trill of an insect and the rest of the world found themselves imagining it too.

To my chagrin, I had never actually read Carson’s book despite knowing how instrumental it has been in the course I’ve been able to choose for my life. I asked myself why and admitted that I had always thought it would be too depressing. Yet, it is a book that comes up often and I decided this was the year I would rectify that.

It is indeed a depressing book, or least it would have been had I read it in 1962. The details of the impacts of synthetic pesticides were horrifying. What destroys wildlife across species also poisons our children. Yet, I listened to the terrors of Silent Spring unfurl, knowing that much of the damage being done was halted if not reversed. The populations of redhead and ruddy ducks rebounded, and bald eagles came back from the brink. Yet, being raptor-centric, I had never heard the story about what DDT did to robins. It got to me.

In the 1950s, American elm trees were succumbing to Dutch Elm disease. Terrified that we might lose the iconic elms, trees across the East Coast were sprayed with DDT and no further thought. However, rain couldn’t wash the pesticide from the leaves, and they drifted to the ground frosted with poison. The tainted leaf litter became forage for earthworms, which survived but concentrated the poison consumed in their bodies. It took eating less than a dozen earthworms, a core component of a Robin’s spring diet, to kill them.

After 12 years of using DDT to protect elms on the campus of Michigan State University, the population of 336 robins dwindled to 18. In 1963, when biologists studied Hanover, New Hampshire, a town that had used DDT for many years, they estimated a loss of 350-400 robins. This was 70 percent of the resident population. Urban residents in places that were sprayed laments dozens of dead and dying birds in their yards.

“To millions of Americans, the season’s first robin means that the grip of winter is broken. Its coming is an event reported in newspapers and told eagerly at the breakfast table. And as the first mists of green appear in the woodlands, thousands of people listen for the first dawn chorus of the robins throbbing in the early morning light.” - Rachael Carson

Black-headed grosbeaks are my robins. In fact, they have a such a similar song that sometimes even the Merlin App conflates the two species. A friend told me that “a black-headed grosbeak is just a robin with singing lessons.”  They are very different species, but fill a similar role in the soundtrack of spring.

This morning, I listened to the raucous chorus greeting the dawn in my yard. Then I imagined it dwindling species by species. First the grosbeaks. Then the orioles, the Cassin’s kingbirds, and the warblers. Spring would sound like the lesser chorus that scores the rest of the year. Then I imagined the loss of the scrub jays, the kestrels, the red-shouldered and red-tailed hawks. Finally, the crows and ravens, sparrows and finches. Silence.

I had made myself weep, both because it is imagining a hole in my being and because we stopped it before it happened. I wept because I had hope.

My black-headed grosbeak flock gets a little larger on every spring migration and I’d guess I’m hosting at least 30 this year. I don’t know where they come from, and I don’t know where they go but I hope they bring someone else as much joy in their winter and breeding grounds. Yes, we are still harming nature, perhaps destroying it, but a movement fifty years ago brought back my childhood dreams of peregrines and gave me years of watching one hunt from hearty flocks of redhead ducks. Carson may have been the catalyst, but it was millions of others who fought for legislation and chose to make a difference.

So many of those people are still with us. They are still good people. There are people like me who were born after Carson’s rallying cry, and I am surrounded by those younger than me who are still doing this work. We did it before and we can do it again one piece at a time. In fact, I think we will.

Maybe we are just due for a new rallying cry, not one of fear or virtue, or arguing science, but one of love. And perhaps it isn’t a rallying cry at all, but an exodus away from screens, spilling out into nature where we find it – in the ten feet around us, in our backyard and in neighborhood gardens. Maybe it’s a movement of simply falling in love with the nature that comforts, surprises, and teaches us while giving more back no matter how much we give.

Maybe we just need to fall in love again, not just with nature but who we are when we are immersed in what is wild. And then to help others do the same. I’d like to start by showing you my grosbeaks and then I would like to hear what wakens your heart on perfect spring morning outside.