The Rice Bird Remembers

 

“a bubbling delirium of ecstatic music that flows from the gifted throat of the bird like sparkling champagne.”  

20th-century ornithologist Arthur Cleveland Dent

 

The bobolink, sometimes called the rice bird, visits the prairies of both Acadie and the Gulf coast along its migration flight.

These aren’t the only two stops it makes, but still we can call this bird a shared creature with our cousins in the North.

This bird’s population is waning more each year that passes, mostly because of habitat loss and degradation;

it stands as a symbol of ecological erosion for everyone who watches it, noticing it diminish all the way up and down its arc of existence.

This bird also sings a song you wouldn’t believe – when I first listened to a recording I laughed, astounded. 

The birds are losing their homes, and they are singing beautiful songs.

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“a mad, reckless song-fantasia, and outbreak of pent-up, irrepressible glee” 

20th- century ornithologist Ferdinand Schuyler Mathews

 

People or populations of any kind that are oppressed, or that experience an inordinate amount of trauma but who still manage

to maintain optimism or “bounce back,” we call resilient. Their joy is broken, or stolen, but they still sing and dance despite

(or maybe because of) the pain. If it’s a person that still sings, we say it’s a choice.

If it’s a bird, we ascribe the still-proud chanson to its nature. But how unlike the bird are we, really, if we also are animals?

I have seen a fiddler wail and stomp her way through “Mon coeur fait mal..” I have felt the wooden dance floor tremble and quake with the two-step of Theriots and Thibodeauxs and other children of children of exiles. I have heard the unforeseen tragic killing of Amédé Ardoin in his earliest recordings. 

It’s true we are a resilient people, but maybe it isn’t so special to be resilient. 

What is the alternative to being resilient but Death?

 

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“a tinkle of fairy music, like the strains of an old Greek harp” 

source unknown

 

I once met an Acadian girl who spoke Chiac, and told me that her family always referred to the Cajuns –

the ones who’d come, or been taken, here to Southwest Louisiana – as their future.

Tears sprung to my eyes as I told her hurriedly that I’d always thought of them, the Acadians, back there, as our past.

We’ve been thinking of each other this whole time, as corresponding parts of the same story in time;

we’ve just been occupying different parts of space.

Like many birds, the bobolink uses cosmic bodies and earthbound landmarks to help guide them on their migration route;

small quantities of a magnetic mineral called magnetite are held inside the tissues of their nasal cavity

to enhance their navigation ability.

The very tissue of its body holds the secret to remembering its home. And not just home, but all of its homes.