I can understand why many people like to photograph birds. It’s a great way to capture some aspects of the visual beauty of birds. Although I have a good camera with a 400 mm lens, I’m a lousy photographer and I tend to leave photography to others.
But there’s another reason why I do that – to me, a photograph is a poor representation of a bird! Birds are colour and movement, birds are song, birds are characters! In other words, birds are poetry! So, I write poems about birds, rather than photographing them.(That said, where there are poems below with images, it was me who took the photos).
To me, poems must have both rhythm and rhyme and they must tell a story. It’s challenging to write poems like that, which presumably is why so very few people do. Most so-called poetry nowadays is better described as imagery. The poet paints a picture (sometimes a very good one) using words, but with scant attention to the constraints of rhythm and rhyme. Conversely, there are many “bush poets” who usually know how to make a rhyme, and some of whom can tell a good story – but they mostly ignore rhythm completely.
I take great pleasure in constructing “real” poems about birds. So far, they all are about birds I've seen in Australia although some of the species I've picked have a global distribution. Below is my anthology. My current favourite is Dark Master of the Sky, which I wrote after reading John Baker’s compelling 1967 book The Peregrine. Also, I think An Encounter with a Wandering Albatross somehow has captured the rollicking nature of a boat trip out to see pelagic birds. I also am very pleased with A Private Audience, which I wrote in a whirr of euphoria in the evening after I had watched a male Rufous Scrub-bird calling for about 10 minutes from a perch about a metre above the ground in the Gloucester Tops. Scrub-birds usually are extremely cryptic birds that spend most of their time hidden under dense ground cover.
Which is your favourite? Email me telling me why: alan@thinkingaboutbirds.com
Poems about seabirds
An Encounter with a Wandering Albatross
Poems about shorebirds
Poems about scrub-birds
How to see a Rufous Scrub-bird
Poems about other birds
Black Thoughts (Corvids of the Hunter)
Miscellaneous other poems
Elements of a Birdwatcher's Armoury
Thoughts Based On Three Days Spent Birding on Broughton Island