Thank you, Eric.
I learned about the BioBlitz not long
after I moved here, which was just about a year ago.
So I'm feeling all sort of homey now.
This is "The Gilded Flicker.
Clear."
"Is it because the late August air is otherwise so quiet
that the call of a flicker sounds so clear and so strong?
I remember how, during Utah Augusts, there would be,
above our acreage or in the mountains, only
the occasional birdie chatter, siskins and robins, finches
and chickadees, a hawk, a briefly rowdy riot
of magpies or ravens.
But that list suggests, wrongly, a cacophony.
Bird sound in late summer is mostly
broadcast from some kind of ambient enviro-channel,
background nature sounds on New Age satellite radio.
The volume is barely turned up.
The signal's often lost in all the drowsy air, the months
as whispery as it is hot.
A flicker's call spears the air the way
its skull-wrapped tongue shoots out to slurp up ants
from the ground.
A flicker's quick call is a high-pitched stab,
'keer,' or, as I hear it, now 'clear,' a floured spike
of glass, shooting from the hollow of your chest.
In August, the flicker's call sharpens
the air, drops the temperature a second,
tells languid fall to hurry along.
'Clear' is a tangy call that calls out diminished things.
I really knew flickers first in Kansas, unaware
of where they'd take me.
Flickers nested in the cavity of a hackberry tree
outside my window.
Their calls, their drumming beaks on the roof and utility
poles' metal casings were an exuberance I learned from.
They poked their heads out of the hole
like Ovidian fables born instantly
from darkness in the bark.
They drum their bills on the pergola.
They fly to dead cottonwoods.
They'd call 'clear,' rising, mountains rising, clear,
water rushing beneath.
How odd, how old, their panache and surreal antiquity,
flickers in Utah.
Like the call of an ashram gong, their notice
would tell me to stop whatever it
was that seemed so important.
Because nothing mattered more than 'clear'
and the silence after.
The sky got bigger then.
If I ask how it is I came to the Southwest,
the flicker would answer that its name is a verb.
What I knew in Kansas and Utah was the northern flicker,
a Jay-sized brownish woodpecker with a barred back.
That sounds dull.
Flickers are vivacious and elegant,
a black sash of a chest, pale belly polka-dotted with black.
Males in the West daubed red on their cheeks,
red or yellow on the underside of their tails and wings,
red in the West, yellow in the East.
The gilded flicker, not respecting geography
in this instance, is yellow-shafted,
though its range is distinctly Southwestern.
Maybe gildeds forged their yellow feathers
from all that Sonoran sunshine.
After all, they live exclusively among saguaros.
Their calls average higher pitched than northerns,
one field guide tells me, but I can't hear much difference.
This guide also says both species
are essentially identical.
In fact, where gilded and northern intermix,
they'll sometimes breed.
They hybridize.
Gilded or northern, they're flickers.
What makes a bird?
When, bewildered to live here, I first
stood looking at a swale of saguaros,
the mountains piled up close by like all
the right mysterious reasons, I saw a gilded flicker
perched atop a tall saguaro.
I saw another one stick its long bill, then
its dark-hide head from the boot of another saguaro, that
hole the flickers dig out, waiting months for sap
to harden so they might have a nest.
The gilded flickers were at home there.
DNA makes a bird.
Place makes a bird.
We make birds.
We deem the gilded a subspecies of the northern
and declare it a species unto itself twice.
Metaphor makes a bird.
Rump, whiteness, cumulus, chest marked black
as night inside a cactus, male are red as paintbrush.
Suddenly, above the thorny uplight and uplift
of saguaros, what made a gilded flicker was
the sad, sweet jolt of 'clear' that
pierced hot and wavy silence.
This is the flicker's contact call,
the way they find others of their kind, miles apart.
It finds me here, in every place I'll ever hear it or will."
Excuse me.
"It finds me here, in every place I've ever heard it,
or will.
What makes a bird, makes me."
[APPLAUSE]