by Fred MacVaugh
Part 1 is here.
Today, the birds I see are too far away to identify. They hop and flit quickly. Could they be dark-eyed juncos? Perhaps they’re American tree sparrows? Against the background of brown and gray gravel, I lose them momentarily. At dawn or dusk especially, my eyes need time to adjust. Even silent, their presence is reassuring.
During last September’s Theodore Roosevelt Symposium at Dickinson State University, historian Duane Jundt noted that few have appreciated Roosevelt’s sensitivity to birdsong. Another omission in the Roosevelt mythology is that few, if any, have considered him a man of emotion. But I think they’re wrong. Roosevelt struggled with fear and grief in equal measure. It’s what brought him to Medora and the Dakota Territory: the deaths of his wife and mother within hours of one another in New York.
For me, the season is different than for Roosevelt, the winter instead of either the spring or summer he described in “The Home Ranch;” nonetheless, the hope I feel on seeing these birds, on hearing twice the call of a robin from the bare limbs of the cottonwoods in the Missouri River bottoms—it’s physical, a stronger heartbeat followed by a surge of warmth I imagine no less therapeutic than the birdcalls Roosevelt heard, named, and described as he sat and rocked on his Elkhorn Ranch veranda. I can’t wait for spring.
Former Theodore Roosevelt National Park superintendent Valerie Naylor once remarked that Roosevelt never expressed what about his badlands experiences helped him heal from his heartache. I wonder, could it have been the birds? Scientists today might say, “Yes, it was.”
Could we credit the birds for his resilience and presidency, for his ability to confess his pain and recover? “From the upper branches of the cottonwood trees overhead,” he wrote, “whose shimmering, tremulous leaves are hardly ever quiet, but if the wind stirs at all, rustle and quaver and sigh all day long, comes every now and then the soft, melancholy cooing of the mourning dove, whose voice always seems far away and expresses more than any other sound in nature the sadness of gentle, hopeless, never-ending grief.” If this mourning dove and other badlands birds did indeed help Roosevelt recover, how can they help us today and in the years to come?
How about you? What birds do you look for in the spring? We’d like to know!
Here is part 1 of Fred’s essay.
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