Meeting Minutes
Properties
Wetlands
Conservation
and More
Your Back Yard
Maps
How to Help

Conservation Commission

Conservation and More

              by Bruce B. Beckley

Issue #99, March, 2001
There's A Song In The Air

The songs in the air keep coming from every direction. Twittering fills the tops of the pines as I go for the paper and the sun rises. Chickadees and juncos hardly pause as they flit about in a springtime frenzy being musical, territorial, amorous and hungry all at once. Other voices in the avian chorus punch through the contrapuntal chickadee medley. Mourning doves, cardinals and titmice cover two registers as they greet the day with notes of coah-coo-coo and what cheer, cheer, cheer. As our early ancestors sat shepherding flocks on a distant hill learning to mimic nature's songsters, I wonder if it was the mourning dove that led to the crafting of the first pan pipes.

Some fellows just haven't mastered the art of tuning. I'm thinking of the blue jays calling thief-thief and the passing crows. The songs go on into the evening as the male woodcock peents in his courtship ritual. Soon an owl will chime in and occasionally a whippoorwill will introduce his repetitious passacaglia.

As much as we think of birds when we talk about music in the natural world, there are so many other sections in the band with their own styles and compositions. The snare drum staccato of tree trunks freezing and thawing has given way to the plucking plinks of sap dripping from the spile into the waiting bucket. With the marshes opening and the vernal pools soon to follow, that hallmark of a new season, the spring peeper will be filling the evening air.

Every part of nature creates its music. Paul Winter merged the sounds of the Grand Canyon, whales fathoms deep and his own saxophone in a common song with the wolf pack celebrating in the moonlight. We hear waves, wind and water with tunes of their own and playing off their surroundings. How many different melodies can the wind make in the trees? It depends. Is the wind gentle or a nor-easter? Are the merry little breezes stirring a quaking aspen, the stiff needles of a spruce, or playing with last year's leaves on a white oak? To ears that hear, each can be as distinctive as Bach or Bartok.

Hear the range in water's voice starting with the trickling, bubbling pianissimo of the brooklet leaving Monadnock behind to the sfortzando of the waves running against the granite of Boar's Head. The sounds don't stop. Nature's music is there for the hearing. Some human sounds blend. Others do not. As I am musing about music, I come back to the twitterings in the pine tree and match that to the happy recess sounds from Wilkins School which intermingle with the blackbird calls coming across the former cranberry bog to the village.

Like the rest of the natural world, the music of the spheres and the sparrow is out there for the listening. Enjoy.

Walking In Nature's Garden

The ACC will bring man's music together with scenes from Nature's garden at the April meeting of the Amherst Gardeners. We will see some of the ACC-managed lands and the plants that grace them. After a look at plants through the seasons in a backyard sanctuary, niches in Nature's garden, common as well as out of the way, will be visited to the accompaniment of "L'horge de Flore" by Francaix. Hope to see you there.

Ex Hynalis

I've often thought "Oh What A Beautiful Morning" should be in the hymnal with the other songs for opening worship on a new day. It isn't, but this one is:

All beautiful the march of days, As seasons come and go;
The hand that shaped the rose hath wrought The crystal of the snow;
Hath sent the hoary frost of heaven, The flowing waters sealed,
And laid a silent loveliness on hill and wood and field.

O'er white expanses sparkling pure The radiant morns unfold;
The solemn splendors of the night Burn brighter through the cold;
Life mounts in every throbbing vein, Love deepens round the hearth,
And clearer sounds the angel hymn, "Good will to all on earth".

Dorothy M.W. Bean

Last Update: