Purple Finches
Would it not be lovelier for our students to show up each morning to a campus that was alive with wings and music?
Several weeks ago, Southern New England enjoyed an unusually warm Saturday. In the middle of summer fifty degrees will send chills down your spine but, in midwinter, it feels almost balmy. My seven-year-old son and I took advantage of the warmish air and strengthening light by starting a campfire in the back yard. I had a few cedar off-cuts from the Classical Roots Veggie Garden’s new fence on hand and the sweet, spicy smell of the wood lingered in the still air as it burned: a perfect winter afternoon. At one point, I went inside the fetch a few marshmallows and returned to find Brody standing out in the grass, totally still, his face lifted toward the bare branches of the Norway Maple tree whose spread dominates the back half of our yard. In its topmost branches, a little flare of rosy light betrayed what he was interested in: a Purple Finch was perched there in the sun, chirping its liquid music.
I inherited a love of birds from my maternal grandmother, who painted little watercolors of local songbirds that I can still remember hanging in the foyer of their house in South Carolina. My favorites of all birds are the raptors: hawks and especially owls. We have several species of both even here in densely-populated eastern Massachusetts and on several occasions I’ve looked out one of our back windows to see a Cooper’s Hawk sail past like a lightning bolt and snatch a finch out of the air, a sight that never ceases to delight, even if it’s a bit grim. But I also love songbirds and I’m particularly fond of Purple Finches. It was a special pleasure to think that my son might also have begun to love them—I’ve never met a bad-hearted bird watcher, so I’m taking it as a sign of good character.
Armchair ornithologists take a natural, even subconscious interest in the birds who populate the places where they live and work. It’s been a victory to watch more and more species appear in my back yard over the seven years since we bought the house, digging flower borders into the trackless grass, planting orchard trees, and establishing berry shrubs in which the birds delight. The bare landscape, once visited only by crows, has gradually grown into a living one, dotted in summer by the neon-yellow goldfinches in their clustering formations and in winter by the red flare of cardinals or the nervous energy of titmice.
My disappointment with the bird population at Covenant Christian Academy, just a few miles away as the titmouse flies, has been inversely proportionate: nothing flies here but the perennial swarms of House Sparrows which, though they’re fun and cheerful in their thuggish way, don’t exactly inspire poetry with their mindlessly glottal song which repeats itself endlessly, like a toddler’s “are we there yet?” from the back seat of a car.
I’m not the only one for whom this flying monoculture has created concern. Indeed, a lack of diverse bird species is one of the best indicators that the local ecology has gone bad, since they feed on the smallest organisms, primarily insects, which are the first to be wiped out by the use of the broad-spectrum pesticides and herbicides we so liberally spray on our grass here in the U.S. House Sparrows are dependant on humans for their nesting sites and will eat literal trash, so they can stick it out even when nothing else can, but would it not be lovelier for our students to show up each morning to a campus that was alive with wings and music?
One of our Seniors here at CCA thinks so: she is writing her Senior Thesis Project this year on the subject of local bird ecology and, having spent the last six months or so conducting a diversity audit on the population, is producing a targeted list of recommendations about what we can plant, organize, and add on our campus to better welcome a few of the more jeopardized local species. One such species is my own beloved Purple Finch.
Emphasizing the Purple Finch might seem like an odd choice, given that it is listed among the species of “least concern” by the Audobon Society’s conservation experts. However, that phrase can be a little misleading since “least” only means less in comparison to other urgent matters. As the Cornel Lab of Ornithology tells us, “Purple Finch populations decreased by 0.73% per year between 1966 and 2019, resulting in a cumulative decline of about 32%…”. In other words, though they are by no means critically endangered, Purple Finch numbers have declined by nearly a third in the last century, due mostly to the destruction of their habitats and by the sort of industrial landscaping that dominated the twentieth century, and which our own school building showcases to a tea.
And it is precisely because we can causally link the decline of the Purple Finch to the way we design our surrounding landscapes, both at home and at work, that we still have a cause for hope: what can be planted can be uprooted and replaced. We have plenty of plantable spaces around us. The question is what we put there.
I won’t steal my student’s thunder by articulating all of the specific recommendations she plans to make about how CCA can return the birdsong to our campus. For that, you can and should attend our Symposium Day celebration in April, where you’ll hear her findings for yourself. Instead, I will simply observe that, in my thirteen years on the faculty here, I have only seen birds other than House Sparrows in two places: the Vegetable Garden and the Orchard.
Arriving early one Friday morning last summer to meet with the week's volunteers, I accidentally scattered a cluster of goldfinches who were feasting on the seeds of the catmints we planted below the Veggie Garden fence—it was the first time I’d seen them near our building. A week or so later, I found a robin perched on one of the stakes that support our new orchard trees. It had a worm in its mouth, presumably taken from the Orchard’s now pesticide-free soil. I have yet to see—or hear—a Purple Finch, but I’m confident that I will do one day soon, not because of the work I’m doing, but because of my student’s. My best moments as a teacher have arisen out of situations like these; when I suddenly realize that it’s me, not they, who stands to learn the most from our time together.
