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A beautiful, wild chorus welcomes the eclipse
Kurt Ullrich
Apr. 14, 2024 5:00 am
It’s not quite the world of Maurice Sendak out here, but on some days it feels close. A few days back my cats and I awoke to the sound of birds, specifically robins, hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands of them, filling a field in front of my house, sitting in branches of trees in my hollow, all singing a constant comforting chorus, eating grit from the gravel on my lane, grazing in the grass, and drinking, bathing, and just generally cavorting in a large puddle that forms after every rain.
Clearly the huge flock was simply passing through, on it’s way to somewhere north of here, somewhere where food is plentiful. I’d recommend Minneapolis for the culture but I expect that suggestion wouldn’t fly. My cat Luna has never really much cared about what is happening in the outside world on any given day, a feeling I share, but the heavenly multitude of robins got her attention. All day long she kept returning to the front window, chittering and twittering at the visitors. By days end all of the robins were gone.
Other creatures have made themselves known this past week. The other night at dusk three turkey vultures circled overhead as I walked from the house to my garage. I actually looked up and said to them, “Unless you know something I don’t, I’d suggest you search for a meal elsewhere.” They moved on.
Of course, this past week a solar eclipse has been all of the news. I’d planned to ignore it, you know, catching the highlights on television, wondering why so many people enjoy gathering in large groups, or flocks. Then a Gator ride out to my pond convinced me to pay attention to the eclipse. Hundreds and hundreds of small chorus frogs called Spring peepers were hanging about, raising their little voices, singing so loudly that I could hear them over the sound of my Gator’s internal combustion engine.
Riding up a steep, rocky hill through woods toward the pond during the eclipse was magical, and I wanted to see if the local wild things would change their behavior, perhaps quiet a bit. Just the opposite happened out here, as the more the sun was covered the louder the peepers became, joined by cardinals, a turkey, a coyote, and a mourning dove, a beautiful chorus by those that share this land with me. The music raised me up, not high, but just enough to float above the earth. All across North America we hoped for this raising up, this ability to look to the sky for inspiration, for something bigger than ourselves.
For a little while, as the moon crossed the sun, the light changed, particularly as it filtered through trees, seemingly shifting, and shimmering, causing shadows to appear to float slightly above the ground. It was a distinctly Monet light and my pond was, for a few brief moments, a flowerless poor man’s Giverny.
During the eclipse I sat in my Gator above the pond, listening, looking around, reading a bit of poetry, but mostly being in the moment. The urge to glance at the sun was almost too much to overcome, but overcome I did, as that way lay madness and blindness. I was reminded of a quote I heard recently, words spoken by a character named Dmitri in Dostoevsky’s novel “The Brothers Karamazov.” He spoke not of an eclipse, but of our need to believe in things we cannot see or truly understand, like love, perhaps God, when he said, “I can see the sun, but even if I cannot see the sun, I know that it exists. And to know that the sun is there — that is living.” And so it was.
Kurt Ullrich lives in rural Jackson County. The Dubuque Telegraph Herald recently published a 60-page magazine of Kurt’s columns. The magazine can be purchased here.
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