Tag: birds (Page 1 of 2)

Morning at the Marsh

1 June 2026 / Editor

Nonfiction by Susan Pope

In early May at the shorebird festival in Homer, Alaska, I was invited to read my goshawk attack story at the site where it happened. Since the assailants were not yet nesting, I felt safe from any potential assault.

The event was a fundraiser for the land trust that had rescued a piece of forest and wetlands from bulldozing for development. Here was an opportunity to support a cause I believed in, plus a chance to plug my new book. Birding, hiking, storytelling, snacks. A perfect fundraiser. Local merchants donated food, the trust handled the logistics, the festival advertised the event, my friend Nancy provided bird identification assistance, and my husband Jim supplied the moral support. All I had to do was show up at the trail head, hike to the viewing platform, and read for ten minutes.

I visualized. I timed. I practiced out loud.

I was ready.

But not for leading the hike because the official leader, having no childcare, was forced to bring up the rear with her squealing, squirming toddler. Or for the frequent stops and starts to accommodate the grandma who thought she had signed up for pre-school story hour and kept sprinting off the trail to capture her rubber-booted fleet-footed three-year-old dashing after squirrels. Or for the six-year-old junior birder so eager to find those birds she slammed into my heels each time we paused to listen for one.

Or for the young moose who blocked our path and would not move—despite our clapping, shouting, and pleading—until she’d devoured every last fiddlehead fern. Or for the helicopter circling overhead at the viewing platform where I was to read my story.

Or for the Wilson’s snipe punctuating the roar of the helicopter’s rotors with a furious ack, ack, ack each time I imitated the goshawk’s scream in my story. Or for the pair of Canada jays who swooped in to raid our unguarded snacks when no one was paying attention.

But none of this mattered as I shouted my story in a very non-literary way to people politely trying to listen. The sun shone, the birch and willow leaves popped open, the wrens trilled and twittered, the sandpipers, ducks, geese, and cranes frantically fed or nested or headed north, and parents and grandparents did their best to ensure that the next generation had a chance at this one unpredictable and magnificent life.

Susan Pope’s work has appeared in Creative Nonfiction Short Reads, Alaska Magazine, River Teeth Beautiful Things, and The Bluebird Word Literary Journal, among others. Her memoir Rivers and Ice follows five generations of one Alaskan family in the rapidly changing landscape of the North. She lives in Anchorage, Alaska.

Coorong

1 June 2026 / Editor

Nonfiction by Roger Funston

Today I walk a sixteen kilometer transect over coastal dunes and along brackish lagoons. We are keeping a list of the migratory birds we see—Eastern Curlew and Bar-tailed Godwit, critically endangered; Red-necked Stilt, vulnerable. These birds fly 8,000 miles from China and Siberia to winter in Coorong National Park. It is April 1985, autumn in Australia. Soon these birds will make their way back to Northern Hemisphere summer.

Coorong National Park is located on the southern coast of Australia on the South Sea, where the South Pacific and Indian Oceans meet. Mixing of the Southern Sea and the Murray River create estuaries of fresh and saline waters, world class wetlands that are endangered because of reduced freshwater flows and drought. Vulnerable Southern Belle frogs and Heath Goanna live in freshwater. Water birds nest on the saline lagoons and mudflats. The Cooring has one of the largest pelican rookeries in Australia.

Yesterday, I spent the day watching Whimbrels, Red-necked Stilts, Sharp-tailed Sandpipers, Red-necked Avocets through binoculars, poking their bills in the mudflats. Recording observations. Seemingly tedious to some, but this is science and necessary for developing a management plan. The day before we cored in these mudflats to see what invertebrates live there, trying to better understand behavior, important food sources, habitat needs.

Our team is half Aussies and half Americans, mostly short-timers in a long line of volunteer field biologists. The mix of participants is both surprising and wonderful. An executive with Esso, an engineer from mining company BHP, a phone company account rep from Orange County, California, who has brought along two large trunks filled with numerous wardrobes. Perhaps we are all closet environmentalists shedding our day jobs to revel in our passions.

We live communally in roadhouse lodging, sharing cooking, stories, laughter. Card games played at night. The Aussie winner shouts out “You beauty”. Tea and bikkies mid-afternoon. Evening barbies. Singing around the campfire, looking at the stars (bush telly).

Learned a lot of Aussie slang: dog’s breakfast (complete chaos), she’ll be apples (it will be alright), whoop whoop (middle of nowhere), bonzer (awesome), whinger (complainer), sheila (female).

The days are long. Tired at night, but a good tired. I will probably never see these people again. This was my first international field project. Many more will follow. But I will cherish the fond memories of this time and place and the people I worked with.

Roger Funston came to poetry late in life after a long career as an environmental scientist. He writes about his life journey, his travels, his tribe and things he has seen that you can’t make up.

bird dreams

7 March 2026 / Editor

Poetry by Jon Raimon

Waking to bird talk,
I wonder.

Did they wing into
my dreams?

Gather twigs and spring fluff to nest in
my wishes?

I stumble up, feel the fool,
yet sense they are on my side

with hoots and jests
coos and kindness.

They gossip and advise,
each note thrilled with care.

Thank you for swooping
into my hopes.

Know I will, clumsy and earthbound
as I am, try to always listen to

your love calls and unexpected tittering,
your joyous racket and grand laments.

Listen skywards, as you warble your way
into daymares and night longings

a feather touch so light we don’t even know how it heals
our wounds, soothes our grief

a clarion caw, warnings to feel, to
protect these skylands we breathe in

together,
a revelry we must heed and celebrate.

Jon Raimon teaches writing in Ithaca, New York. He writes along with his students, focusing on poetry and short fiction. His inspirations include his children and students, everything within, and all kinds of rocks.

The River God’s Daughter

1 November 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Angela Patten

Here I am on the river again
gliding my kayak past a row of turtles

their shells gleaming in the sun
like freshly washed dinner plates.

I turn to see a muskrat’s muzzle
parting the water like a butterknife.

Around a bend a heron stands
knee-deep in weeds and water

like my father in black rubber
boots fishing on the River Boyne.

Although he loved rivers and streams,
he hated the sea with equal fervor

distrusting its relentless waves
its monotonous unremitting motion.

But back to the heron and the mystery
of that bony beak, that frozen pose

that alien cranium with its opaque eye
the shriek and fluster of its wings

as it takes off creaking into the air
like an early flying machine.

Unlike my father, I loved the sea
and the cold consecration of salt water.

But now I am a convert to the river
that flows through marsh and mudflat

town and village, state and country
the wayward weather its only god.

Angela Patten is an award-winning Irish poet, author of five poetry collections and a prose memoir. Her work has appeared in literary journals and magazines in the U.S. and abroad. A native of Dublin, Ireland, she is a Senior Lecturer Emerita in English at the University of Vermont. Read more at www.carraigbinn.com.

Pulse

11 October 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Richard Levine

One morning alone, light came
and I understood everything
in the world belonged to itself.

The sky surrounded a heron,
and from a green curve in the creek
it rose on the broad majesty

of its loneliness and wings.
The noiseless blue paddling
of my pulse, timed it out of sight.

Above me, wind stirred trees
… is it any wonder stringed
instruments sing so sweetly?

Richard Levine, an Advisory Editor of BigCityLit.com, is author of the forthcoming Taming of the Hour: An Almanac with Marginalia from Fernwood Press.

Kingfisher

7 June 2025 / Editor

Poetry by John Grey

A dazzle of blue
skirts the green-water pond,
merges with a fish
in its squat beak.

He is a king.
No other bird sits so squat,
so regally, on a tree branch.

And a fisher of course.
His catch is inhaled
neatly down his gullet.

He flies off
and other birds arrive
in his wake.

They land
in a wave of salutations,
in a homage
to his feathery crown.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in New World Writing, River And South and Tenth Muse. Latest books Subject Matters, Between Two Fires, and Covert are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Paterson Literary Review, White Wall Review and Cantos.

This morning, I woke early

13 May 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Stacie Eirich

This morning, I woke early, stepped out
when eastern light was rising. A cool breeze
brought goosebumps. Two blue finches
flew fast, diving and calling from tree to tree.
The thick hanging branches of palms swayed,
hiding flashes of feathers beneath green tents.
The rumble of motors began to whir as the hour
turned, the roar of engines breaking through air
as titanium wings soared above, over and over
hulking giants of steel passing in dawn’s light.
The day bright with golden sun, the noise
of so much life, so much commotion.
My heart beats small, silent, my ears unable
to stifle the sounds throbbing around me.
I go back inside, sip my coffee, read a few lines.
Listen to the sounds muted, watch the light creep
over the trees, the rocks, the pool’s edge.
Watch how the water almost stills, its flow
small and constant, a moving blue-green mirror.
Feel how time moves slowly, how in this space
there is only air and light, cool and warmth,
flowing water and rough-hewn rock.
How they live and breathe in the midst
of our human clutter and noise and need
of so much, of more, of everything.
How the only thing they need is the rising
of rays to ascend heavenward— how the branches
reach the light, fingers of fronds dancing
beside a blue jay’s quick winged perch.
How when I step outside once more, my fingers
can’t quite reach, touch, my skin can’t feel
this brightness. My heart moored elsewhere, my soul
seeking peace in a place that can’t be mine. Even with
all this light, all this life— all these things.
What is enough? I wish to be a bird, to fly and call,
fleeing and free, quick and light as dawn, rising
with silver-tipped wings into golden sunlight. Here
then gone — bright, beautiful. A small burst
of feathered joy in golden sunlight, a brush of dawn, a rush
of feathers, a voice ringing loud, blue-silver streak
of a bright, exuberant heart.

Stacie Eirich is a mother of two, caregiver, and poet. Her book, Hope Like Sunlight (Bell Asteri Publishing, 2024), is an illustrated memoir benefitting St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Her poems have recently been published in The Amazine, The Bluebird Word, and Synkroniciti Magazine. She lives in Texas. Visit her at www.stacieeirich.com

Plumage

20 February 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Sam Barbee

The red cardinal, whose head-feathers
have fallen out, sits on the wooden fence.

He notices our yard full of movement, shapes
big and small imparting various shades –

blue sky with white clouds, zinnias.
Dogwood wavers with breeze he does not see.

Motionless, one coarse and knotted branch
cradles the nest he feeds. The birdbath

bends a murky prism, a reflection of scruff
on his grey-red tuft. Unlike full-feathered

finches, and pileated cousins pecking a maple’s trunk,
he can only imagine a proper bonnet of feathers –

not molt or baldness from mites. Not scar
of low-branch wound. Perches content without

storybook color or crest. His grandeur resets
the order. A quest for tranquil, preening wings

on the wooden fence. Sanctified to guard
against squirrels or Cooper Hawk carnage,

he flaps to the nest of hatchlings,
content with reimagined beauty.

Sam Barbee’s newest collection is Apertures of Voluptuous Force (Redhawk Publishing, 2022). He has three previous poetry collections, including That Rain We Needed (Press 53, 2016), a nominee for the Roanoke-Chowan Award as one of North Carolina’s best poetry collections of 2016; he is a two-time Pushcart nominee.

birds flying over body of water during golden hour — Photo by Johannes Plenio on Pexels.com

Houston in August

6 November 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Stacie Eirich

There aren’t any birds here
the only wings in the skies
silver steel, we counted 30
in the space of an hour
over our heads, lights flashing
in early evening skies
drone of engines replacing
songs of sparrows.

On the streets, traffic flows
fast and heavy, whooshing
and swooping across lanes
in swift ascent. Dog-walkers abound
with the dawn, joggers rounding
corners, mothers pushing prams
scores of cars and buses lined up
for drop-off, a continuous cycle
of bicycles, scooters, pedestrians
crossing in pre-dawn light.

I turn down the radio and listen
for each next turn, navigating
a maze of one-ways, interchanges
and tollways. Siri leading me
to the next somewhere else
somewhere new, exciting as it is
unfamiliar and frightening.
It isn’t the size that frightens me,
or the humanity—but that cold silver
in the skies, feathers and song replaced
with aluminum alloys.

101 tons of titanium circling above
our homes, our heads, our children
in the blazing sun of a 106-degree
afternoon, humid and buzzing
with dragonflies, our ears adjusting
to the constant drone of engines
through the night, our hearts longing
for the melodies of
the Carolina Wren
the Eastern Bluebird
the American Robin
the Northern Cardinal.

Our memories full
of blue Louisiana skies
painted with wings
of feathers and light
melody and song drifting down
to meet us in greening grass
brassy winds playing a background
breeze of second-line jazz in our
small-town backyard.

Stacie Eirich is a mother, poet & singer who recently moved to Texas. In 2024, her poems have appeared in Kaleidoscope, The Bluebird Word, Synkroniciti, and Elizabeth Royal Patton Poetry Prize Anthology. In 2023, she lived in Memphis while caring for her child through cancer treatments at St. Jude. Find her at www.stacieeirich.com.

photo of birds on concrete wall near city buildings during daytime — Photo by Negative Space on Pexels.com

Birds at Dawn

12 August 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Sarah Das Gupta

A blackbird sings at break of day,
the notes cascading, trickling,
over sunlit tiles.
On the old flint wall
a sparrow chirps, cheekily
to an awakening garden.
A pair of thieving magpies,
black patches over each eye,
chatter like pirates
from the dark yew,
planning a surprise attack
on the treasures of the bird table;
while ring doves coo softly
from an avenue of ancient limes.

Sarah Das Gupta is a retired English teacher from Cambridge, UK. She has had work published in many magazines/journals including Bar Bar, The Bluebird Word, Cosmic Daffodil, Green Ink, Waywords, Shallot, Pure Haiku, Rural Fiction, American Readers Review, Paddle, and others.