My first field guide:
Pagnucci, Gianfranco
MY FIRST FIELD GUIDE THE VIEW FROM A BIRD'S EYE GIANFRANCO PAGNUCCI Ralph was compassionate. When I met him, he was already seventy-seven and retired grounds-keeper of the thirty-five acre...
...and compassion-caretaking from the point of view of the receiver of the care...
...Was spring late further north...
...He liked the nursing home, though he thought everyone there made too much fuss over him...
...Of course, early birders often verified with shotguns birds they'd identified...
...enlarged...
...In the back, frayed pages of this Golden Nature Guide, under "Records," is a listing for three years-November 27, 1952 when he saw a towhee, to early May, 1955 when he recorded seeing nine cardinals at once...
...Ralph, who looked and so easily let go of things...
...At least once each spring when we walked my six wild acres after that, he told me how much bigger I'd made his world with that book...
...He took with him only a handful of books, gave me a bunch, and left most to the new man who'd replaced him...
...Did Ralph see that field sparrow all that time or was his wife Jessie counting the weeks it came to her feeder and calling Ralnh to look, as in our familv we'll call each other to a window for the first robin or the first snowflake...
...Unlike serious bird-watching, listing is basically a game which involves keeping a list of birds one sees...
...Speaking of bird-watching reminds me of: looking out and trying to stand out of self to look...
...For her, after that nothing looked the same...
...She said, "I'm glad you taught me to look out," looking out, windblown kinglets in her eyes, for she was thinking, compassion is a view from a bird's eye...
...Her eyes fluttered...
...another Ralph, Emerson, asked, "Hast thou named all the birds without a gun...
...Don't worry about rushing back...
...When I met him, he was already seventy-seven and retired grounds-keeper of the thirty-five acre wildflower pre-serve...
...Why don't you go out for a walk," I said...
...The poor state of the borders of tulips and irises and of the flower garden took more days than he had or than his knees could bear...
...The birds that he spotted distinguished his year: May, 1954, "Field sparrow here for three weeks...
...give the bath...
...In my mind his thick hands still point out for me the patch of blue phlox and handful of fox sparrows...
...Several years ago I gave my father-in-law a Peterson field guide to wildflowers...
...He hoped the new man might find the books and notes of some use, for they seemed more the furniture than the sparse furnishings of the place...
...Birding, bird listing, or tally-hunting, as it's called in England, is an old sport...
...So our compassion colors our exchanges, and these generous responses pattern our words as our worlds expand...
...Peterson points out that the idea was to record how many birds counters saw in a fifteen mile circle, one day during Christmas week...
...his world layered...
...and in a blink of one of his clear black eyes, I saw myself in that liquid surface, grown smaller than a gnat, an outlined blueness looking down at him...
...But he still kept the day lily garden and was full of love for the wild...
...She'd been inside all winter with the new baby, and her eyes danced from branch to branch...
...Everybody was walking out to look at them for themselves, and he hoped at least a little of the new interest might turn some of the younger folks there to caretaking...
...I don't know if she really thought of it that way...
...I remember Ralph alongside me, resting...
...It's such a day...
...One icy winter he fell and broke a wrist, but that spring when I visited him, he told me, with a chuckle, the thing that hurt the most was his pride because he fell after his knees gave way, though he was doing less and less for the flowers now...
...After his wife died, though his son wanted to take him in, Ralph went to a nursing home...
...In that clump of dry grasses next to the willow shrubs with last year's leaves...
...What was different that year...
...He moved closer to look...
...I'll watch and feed the baby and try to give the bath...
...An afternoon before the time of mosquitoes I sat on a stump and watched a dusty-blue heron resting on the pond, sometimes rising in a stretch, then rising with a lazy lapping of wings, maybe reminding himself how to fly...
...My wife says that for her, bird-watching is like her first biology class in tenth grade when a simple, flat, green leaf pulsed under a microscope as unimagined, unexplored worlds flowed past...
...Roger Torey Peterson says a sizable list of birds was made on the walls of a cave in southern Spain (Tajo Segura) six thousand years ago...
...It started around 1900 when Frank Chapman began the Christmas census, now called the Audubon Christmas Bird Count...
...There...
...A fellow poet at a spring conference of poets had used that phrase to explain my inverted-head experience with the warbler as I'd described it...
...But it strikes me now that what I saw in my wife's eyes that afternoon was just that thought...
...Ralph was my first field guide and gave me my first bird book...
...Had 1953 been a weedy year...
...What he used to think a weed had become not only a flower, but, with its notched petals, a snowy campion of a family of pinks (caryophyllaceae...
...And a later April when my wife kept looking out and calling me to look at the birds sweeping through...
...Compassion is learned...
...He said out there was his church...
...I was merely repaying what he had started when he gave me a Peterson field guide to birds...
...caretaking among a world full of weeds that flowered was his privilege and blessing...
...He watched me, all in blue, bend down to look at him...
...All the widows trying to learn the names of birds that stopped at the giant feeder they'd had Ralph put up outside the picture window in the TV room, and trying to learn the names of flowers...
...And I remember another spring when a yellow warbler crashed our window and sat blinking in the sunburst pfitzer...
...He and Jessie and the books had had their lifetime in that cottage they'd never owned (this lack of owning was my thought, never Ralph's complaint...
...He was never impatient with what he called his wife's "for-getfulness," and he never forgot a place where once he saw a wildflower or bird...
Vol. 117 • June 1990 • No. 11
