BIRDS IN AN ACACIA TREE

Behind the little stone hut in which I live there's a roofless outdoor kitchen consisting of a cement table with a built-in washbasin. During breakfast I sit on the table looking around. Mostly, I look into a big Acacia pennatula tree, which now at the end of the dry season consists of bare branches issuing small, ferny leaves.

The tree's bare branches host several dense, green clumps of mistletoe, Psittacanthus mayanus, inside which certain birds like to nest. Nesting is on the minds of many birds nowadays because soon rains will come, vegetation will flourish, and a world of juicy caterpillars and bugs will emerge to eat the vegetation, and be eaten by the big acacia's newly hatched nestlings.

Nearest the hut, a pair of Melodious Blackbirds comes and go to a mistletoe, sometimes just looking around, sometimes carrying grassblades or stems to add to a gradually materializing nest. About ten feet beyond, another mistletoe is claimed by two or three noisy, nervous Social Flycatchers who sometimes carry nest material into the mistletoe, though so far they don't seem to have built anything. About five feet beyond that, a female Altamira Oriole each morning adds to her baglike, pendulous nest, dangling from a broken-off twig.

Other species just pass through. A Great Kiskadee sometimes comes storming, raucously cawing k'dawwwww, k'dawwwww , doing nothing but disrupting the nest builders, then leaving. The Golden-fronted Woodpecker drifts through pecking here and there, tugging on this and that loose fleck of bark, then quietly departing. An Olive Sparrow nests in the grass and bushes below the tree, from which several times each day the plain-looking little bird shoots up into the tree calling dw'-chee-chee-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d..., again and again, a sweet song, and other Olive Sparrows out in the bush reply in kind. Some days a single quiet, somber-behaving Clay-colored Thrush passes through. I know he carries a bubbly rainbow song within, for he's one of my favorite singers, but he says nothing here, and I wonder why.

Sometimes I also wonder why watching these birds at breakfast pleases me so. After thinking about it this week, maybe I have it figured out. My explanation begins with studies showing that even if a bird has been raised apart from all other members of his or her species, that bird will build a nest typical of the species, and sing a song recognizable as that species' song. Each bird carries in its genes, then, the information needed to build the right nest, and to sing the right song.

In a sense, then, watching these birds is like watching a lot of little robots programmed to be doing what they're doing. However, there's this:

When a bird is raised isolated from other members of its species, the nest it builds does contains the right materials and is structured right for the species, but it's a bit shabby looking. It's the same with the song. The song has the right motifs, the right pitch and tonality, but it lacks prettiness and what humans might call artfulness.

These mornings birds in the big acacia clearly are not satisfied with being robots merely following instructions; they're doing and redoing, always eager to expand their nesting zone into a neighbor's if they can, otherwise ready to defend their own spot heroically if a neighbor encroaches. There's a kind of dynamic tension among the birds ensuring that offspring will bear the genes of parents who built nests that held fast during the worst storms, and whose songs were the most seductive to mates, while at the same time the most intimidating to covetous neighbors.

So, I like seeing all this because the birds are doing beautifully exactly what I aspire to do. For I, too, am a robot-like entity almost entirely motivated by genetic and social programming, and I, too, struggle toward a higher domain inspired by sky above, ground below, and air all around that moves like thought through a graceful tree.