This is Bird Note.

For poetry month, we're sharing poems about birds from contemporary writers.

In her book, Trophic Cascade, Camille T. Dungee writes about themes of nature and becoming a mother.

The title is an ecological term about how ecosystems go through far-reaching changes with the removal or introduction of a top trophy predator.

In the titular poem of the book, Camille writes about this phenomenon with the reintroduction of grey wolves into Yellowstone National Park.

How their presence had an incredible cascade of positive effects on the ecosystem.

And she draws a parallel to her introduction to motherhood.

In this book, there are many ways in which I'm thinking of that trophy creature, that top predator who's been introduced into my life is my daughter.

There are other poems in this book that talk about the loss of elders as well.

And I think that we experience this very frequently when key people are introduced into our lives or removed from it, everything in our landscape, shifts and changes.

Trophic Cascade

After the reintroduction of grey wolves to Yellowstone and, as anticipated, their calling of deer, trees grew beyond the deer stunt of the mid-century.

In their upreach, songbirds nested, who scattered seed for underbrush, and in that cover, warrant snow shoe hair.

Weasel and Water Shrew returned, also full, and came soon hawk and falcon, bald eagle, kestrel, and with them hawk shadow, falcon shadow.

Eagle shade and kestrel shade haunted newly buried runnels, where mule deer no longer rummaged, cautious as they were now, of being surprised by wolves.

Berries brought bear, while undergrowth and willows growing now right down to the river brought beavers, who dam.

Muscrats came to the dams and tadpoles, came to the night song of the fathers of tadpoles.

With water striters, the dark grey American dipper bought in fresh pools of the river, and fish stayed, and the bear who fished, also called deer fawns, and to their kill scraps came vulture and coyote, long gone in the region until now.

And their scat scattered seed, and more trees brush and berries grew up along the river that had run straight and so flooded.

But thus damned, compelled to meander, is less prone to overrun.

Don't you tell me this is not the same as my story.

All this life, born from one hungry animal, this whole new landscape, the course of the river changed.

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