That which hath wings shall tell the matter

Western Meadowlark

I am like an owl in the wilderness;
I am like a screech owl among the ruins.
I stay awake;
I am like a solitary bird on a roof.
All day long my enemies taunt me;
those who mock me use my name in their curses.
For I eat ashes as if they were bread,
and mix my drink with my tears,
because of your anger and raging fury. (Psalm 102: 6-10 NET)

I've taken videos of birds. One was of American robins picking the mountain ash berries off a tree outside our window on the campus of AMBS. Another was of a crow walking back and forth along the roof ridge of the insurance office across an alley from our condo balcony. It's easy to imagine thought and intention behind those wide and alert eyes somehow; no matter where the robin is in his meander around the lawn, he gives the appearance of keeping close watch on you. Something, somewhere, sometime motivated a watcher to ask “Why?” when the chicken crossed the road.

In King David's sad lament about the abyss into which his life has sunk, an owl in a wilderness, a screech owl among the ruins and an unnamed bird on the roof pinnacle are apparently meant to convey the feelings he's experiencing. There's a solitariness, a loneliness in the owl in the wilderness, there's rage and desperation in the screech owl among the ruins, there's sadness and vulnerability in the bird perching alone on the roof peak while insults are hurled from below.

(David attributes his pain and melancholy to a temper-tantrum on God's part, a common way to justify hardship and disease until Christ put us straight on that matter. (John 9:2&3, KJV) But God will eventually mellow-out again and restore him.)

There's something both sad and poignant about the canary in the coal mine; more vulnerable to the poison gases that can gather there, the dying of the canary warns humans to flee the scene.

I mourn the disappearance of the Meadowlark that used to sing to us from a fence post when we walked to school in the fifties. We've altered the environment endlessly without ever giving a thought to bird habitat, and as a consequence have imperiled the future, for instance. for scores of grassland birds species. Trevor Herriot begins his award-winning book Grass, Sky, Song: Promise and Peril in the World of Grassland Birds with a quotation from Ecclesiastes 10:20. “For the bird of the air/Shall carry the voice;/And that which hath wings/Shall tell the matter.” The birds are still “telling the matter,” but not as the writer of Ecclesiastes envisioned their all-seeingness from high above the earth. In effect, our bird friends are all “canaries in the mine shaft,” and their species being overtaken and finally destroyed by habitat loss and poisoning is a warning about the pattern and future for humanity. Unfortunately, warnings are only good to those who are listening 

. . . and there aren't many.

“When we settled our country, the dark forest was considered in some ways evil and something that you needed to plow or, later, bulldoze. We now have a new understanding of the interconnectedness of ecosystems and the need for bird flyways and why all species matter.” (Douglas Brinkley)

I wonder of Brinkley has thought this through lately.