This is Bird Note. It's National Poetry Month in the US, and we're celebrating by sharing contemporary writers work about birds.

Which Poet Susan Nguyen didn't think about that much until 2020 when the COVID pandemic began.

I was home all the time as many of us were and my neighbor gave me their extra hummingbird

feeder and we kind of had a competition just to see like oh which one are they going to go to.

Susan took to naming some of her regulars like Clementine and Jellybelly and watching these birds brought a kind of peace.

It was a little bit of magic happening every day outside my window during a time.

I think that was pretty difficult.

As Susan began researching her new feathered friends, she learned how much these birds defy our expectations.

Like, for almost two centuries, scientists believed that Hummingbird's tongues worked through capillary action.

But in 2015, they found out like they've been wrong this entire time.

Their tongues do not work like a straw.

It works differently. And I just thought that, I thought that was incredible that we went that long just assuming like, yeah, of course that's how their tongues work, you know, and then someone actually observed them. Like just set up a camera and we're like, this is not what I'm seeing, right?

And it was so much more recent.

Learning about these tiny glittering marvels wound up inspiring a poem. In praise of a hummingbird's tongue.

So long it coils around their small skulls, a forked miracle that traps nectar, collects it in the beak and forces it to the back of the throat.

That's where the hum begins, flicks in and out and again.

Something about surface tension, how a dead hummingbird's tongue and nectar will drink repeatedly.

A flock of live hummingbirds is a bouquet of white bellies, humming.

Something about how hard it is to stay still, be an absence of sound.

I name each bird as they float at my feeder, a glittering of green, the way they fan their tail feathers,

the way they dive bomb each other through the notes of their bodies hum, so small a marvel.

But back to the tongue, back of the throat, anything but the absence of miracle.

...