This is Bird Note.

April is National Poetry Month in the U.S.

And to celebrate, we're featuring some of our favorite contemporary writers' work about our feathered friends.

Sidney Wade is the author of Bird Book, a poetry collection entirely about birds.

She's been an avid birdwatcher for nearly two decades, ever since tagging along with her

local Audubon group.

I remember very clearly the moment it happened, the group leader managed to find a small

bird that's usually pretty hard to see.

It's called a northern parala, and it's extraordinarily beautiful, and they usually hang out in the very tops of trees, and so unless you're looking for them, you just won't see them.

And when I finally got this little bird in my binoculars, I started screaming.

It's so beautiful. Oh, my God, it's so beautiful.

When you get a spectacular-looking creature in your binoculars, it looks like you're standing

right next to it. You just lose yourself. It's a very zen kind of an experience.

Since first spotting that northern parola, Sydney has learned a lot about birds.

But for even a lifelong birder, there are days where you learn something new and entirely unexpected.

Here's Sydney with a poem about one such encounter with a double-crested cormorant.

Blue.

The great blue song of the earth is sung in all the best venues, treetop, marsh, desert, shore.

And on this spring day in the wetlands where, under a late sun, we stand alone and in love with each other and the passing day, we watch a cormorant whose eye is ringed in blue diamonds, a shimmering lure, and we love this blue and this dark bird and this deepening sky that pinks and hums in the west. And then the bird opens his beak and flutters his throat. And the late afternoon light illuminates the inside

tissue of his mouth, which is as blue as his ocular jewelry, as blue as the bluest ocean, as blue as the sky in all its depth,

as blue as the back of the small and determined beetle who struggles to roll his enormous dung ball

in his own breeding bid to enchant another small blue miracle. Sydney had this discovery at one of her favorite burning spots,

...