Finding Crows
Thoughts About Trees and Birds
I usually wake up to the sounds of birds. Hanging a bird feeder in a huge linden tree was one of my first priorities moving into this house. It was as if a call was sent to ask nature to please come and hang out here, I need you…
This morning I didn’t hear the birds… It was the sound of machinery, chain saws, and the shouts of men trying to direct the chaos they had brought forth. They were tearing down the woods in a lot near my house. Why should I care? Just an overgrown plot of land, one of many useless lots given property value when building houses, strip-malls, roads, parking lots, having the piss-scent of human sprawl marked upon it. It is a sadness I feel whenever nature is destroyed for PROGRESS. Destruction in the name of progress is always so loud, involving hammering, loud grinding gears, dirty smoggy engines, relentless battle of chainsaws and wood. What took nature years of persistence to patiently create, had been overtaken and conquered within minutes by the machines and loud tools of humans. Progress, the ultimate power struggle for world domination, is all about control and making nature bend under the will of Man. Has progress ever stopped to see the hawk nest in the large ash tree? Progress has never took time to listen to the tapping of the woodpeckers on a willow tree that split during a storm, or experience the excitement of finally seeing the elusive crows calling out amid the underbrush.
After the machines have stopped, the chainsaws cease, all human presence gone, there is quiet. It is not the quiet of peace and solitude but the lack of sound, an eerie dead silence that follows destruction. Progress does not hear the sound of birds, but only the sound of its own voice, alone.