April-soundways | A Door Ajar | Into the Wave 

Absent place – an April Day -, c. 1865 (Fr958A)

According to the Snell meteorological record, April was a month of varied weather. Although it opened with rain, which returned on April 2 (“NE weather”), 10, 14, 23 (with lightning), 25, 26, 27, and 29, fine days were also abundant, falling on April 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 15, 16, 21, 24, 29, and 30. Winds blew primarily from the North, Northeast, and Northwest—and clouds—stratus most commonly, but also nimbus—appeared in the skies on April 5, 13, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 25, and 27, with snow reported on April 10 (mixed with rain and hail), 11, and 12. On the coldest day of the month, April 5, the thermometer fell to just below 32º F; with the highest reading of the month reaching almost 65º F on April 22. Together rain and snow-melt measured 2.5 inches, and 5 inches of new snow fell. On April 7, the Northern Lights appeared in the sky.

There are no bird-notes in the April record of the weather, perhaps because there were no singular returns but waves of many different birds…

Bird species in the scatterplot for April exceed 100.

Now the listener leans in an open doorway attending to the rain.

On the first fine day, the song of a single Bobolink “cuts the airy way,” then  passes into billows of twittering Sparrows moving north: Savannah Sparrows, Vesper Sparrows, Field Sparrows, White-throated Sparrows, Swamp Sparrows…

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And now, the first wave of Sparrows passed or settled deep into the scene, the Warblers replace them…

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Then swallows, swifts, and vireos sweep in on new winds.

The sounds of the birds signal their locations.  They are drawing the boundaries of their territories with invisible threads of sound.

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At last, the ecstatic songs the Wren, gravid and hidden, and the Thrush, high in the canopy, summon the strange, spectral song of the Ruddy Pigeon, searching for its closest missing kin and sounding its passing and passing out of the world forever.