“The grackles sing avant the spring.”
American poet Wallace Stevens, who lived near where I live, in Hartford, wrote those words in late winter when he was good and tired of seeing snow on the ground. When he heard the raspy call of the grackles, even with snow still coating the grass, he took their calls as one sign that spring was on the way. A straw to grasp.
I’ve been watching grackles a lot this year, in this time of social isolation, as they flap and splash in the birdbath and waddle around the yard, picking up grass and leaves for their nest.
They’re beautiful birds, iridescent teal around their head and shoulders, iridescent purple on their wings and backs.
And when they splash in the birdbath, they do it with such unfettered enthusiasm, I feel happy just looking at them. (Photo credits to Joseph Rubin).
Grackles aren’t the only visitors to our birdbath. We also squirrels, and all kinds of birds, especially robins and mourning doves,
Did you know that the Latin name for the common robin is Turdus Migratorius? “Turdus” is the Latin word for “ugly.” I don’t get that. If I were a robin I would hold a gigantic grudge against the ornithologist who made that decision.
We get a lot of squirrels, too. I don’t usually think of squirrels as having lips, and yet….
I watch the grackles gathering materials for their nest, and I’m glad that my garden cleanup efforts have spared them a few things.
This is my little backyard garden, where the grackles waddle around picking up nesting material.
I watched the grackles doing the same thing last year, but I never saw or thought about where they were putting all those leaves and twigs.
Until midsummer, when this thing blew down onto my deck. I didn’t take a picture of it because at first I didn’t know what it was. It was circular, about 8 inches in diameter, about the size of a small personal pizza. It had a narrow lip around the perimeter. It was made of plant materials and a lot of mud. And it was heavy.
I poked at it and turned it over. It finally dawned on me that it must have been what those grackles were building. It must have been in the Norway spruces hanging over the deck.
And what do you know, research revealed that grackles especially like to build their nests in conifers, AND that they make them with mud. The Cornell University Ornithology Lab’s excellent site, All About Birds, says this:
“The nest can take as little as a week to as long as six weeks to finish. It’s a bulky cup made of twig, leaves, and grasses along with bits of paper, string, cloth, corn husks and other incidental materials. The female reinforces the nest cup with mud and then lines it with fine grasses and horse hair. The finished nest is 6-9 inches across, with an inside diameter of 3-5 inches and a depth of 3-9 inches.”
The nest I saw on my deck was nowhere near as concave as this one. It was pretty flat, I guess because it had slammed down from the high Norway spruces above.
You can see the mud around the edges of this nest, sort of.
Here’s the full text of the Wallace Stevens poem that begins, “The Grackles Sing Avant the Spring.
In his orotund, Wallace Stevens way, he’s saying that the grackles are saying that it’s almost spring, that he’s sick of the snow, and the Devil can take the snow to hell and have a big party there.
I get him.
SNOW AND STARS
The grackles sing avant the spring
Most spiss— oh! Yes, most spissantly.
They sing right puissantly.
This robe of snow and winter stars,
The devil take it, wear it, too.
It might become his hole of blue.
Let him remove it to his regions.
White and star-furred for his legions.
And make much bing, high bing.
It would be ransom for the willow
And fill the hill and fill it full
Of ding, ding, dong.