I'm Adeline Mone and this is The Slowdown.

Just a few days ago, I was alone in my kitchen and said out loud to myself.

As birds go, I really liked the brown thrasher and then I laughed.

I laughed at the phrase, as birds go, as if I wasn't interested in all birds and all

the winged things that empty the feeder, seed by seed, season by season.

Even as I say this now, I think about the time I learned the name of the thrasher and

how it sounded like a heavy metal band.

It sounded chaotic and violent and yet the bird is mellow, fox colored and wanders the yard

like an upstanding citizen.

I love knowing what these monogamous long-build flyers that know over 1,000 songs are called.

Today's poem centers on that meditative act of identifying a bird and how in that intense

watching, that observation of their world, we are also discovering something true

about ourselves.

My Ornithology by Hai Dong Fan

In the middle of my life, I found myself in an edge habitat, staring into the dense

tangles of blackberry and watching a baffling fall warbler feeding drowsily in the shrubs.

He was strikingly plain, all of green with grayish head.

You might even say dull, dark, dingy, distinctly indistinct, an orange crown of the eastern

cellata subspecies, remarkably and characteristically late, a recent arrival from the boreal

north of Alaska and Canada drifting south easterly across the Great Plains and Mississippi

Valley to Terry at my local patch in Warren County, Illinois.

He takes his dear, sweet time for what's the hurry?

...