There Is Always Some Beauty Left
The next time you’re in a grocery store standing in front of the dairy case, looking for eggs or yogurt, or walking down the pasta aisle or going through check out, take a closer look at the strips of tape on the floor six feet apart (assuming your store has these aids to social distancing). Imagine a bird with a wing span so large it could stand on one piece of that tape and cover up each of the pieces to the right and left. Twelve feet! The Wandering Albatross could actually do that, holding the record for the largest wingspan of any living avian species.
I know that because I came home from work (in a grocery store), my first day back after vacation and looked up “Birds with longest wingspan.” I looked at a list of the top fifteen and it included several other kinds of albatross, a pelican, a condor, a vulture, a stork and a Trumpeter Swan.
I was curious because at one point during the day I was looking at the distance between two of those ubiquitous pieces of tape and for some reason asked myself “Isn’t that about the wing span of a bald eagle?”
I did some research online and in our Peterson Field Guide to the Birds, eventually coming to the record-setting albatross. Not sure why eagles came to mind, looking at scuffed up tape on a floor, but I had been thinking bird thoughts over the weekend while drinking coffee, sitting on the deck at our relatives in upstate New York. For one of the very few times ever, I watched a bird perform its song. A cardinal on a tree top, called out “Chew, chew, chew,” at least that’s the way I heard it. Peterson’s rendering is “Cheer, cheer, cheer.” We saw Blue Jays and catbirds and a little finch and heard songs the source of which we couldn’t name. I learned it’s a myth that Blue Jays aren’t really blue (that’s actually a debate) and that swifts can’t take off from the ground (they can). There’s a lot to learn out there.
There are more able birders out there reading this, certainly. I’ve never been driven to keep a life list, though I am wholly in admiration of the commitment that takes. It’s great to have real birders around to identify species quickly and I love to have names for things. In one of his essays, Edward Abbey wrote–
“What is it?” we ask, meaning what is its name? This odd quirk of the human mind: unless we can name things, they remain for us only half-real. Or less than half-real: nonexistent. A man without a name is nobody. A man’s name can become more important than his person. A plant, an animal, a thing without a name is no thing– nothing. No wonder we humans like to think that in the beginning was–the Word. What word? Any word. Any word at all, anything rather than the silence and terror of the nameless.
All that from ugly strips of tape on a dusty retail floor. Way leads on to way, as one of our great poets put it. Link leads to link, person leads to person, all is connected, meditation on a small thing can lead to bigger notions. Anne Frank wrote “I’ve found that there is always some beauty left — in nature, sunshine, freedom, in yourself; these can all help you.”
