My good friend and mad bird-lover, Tonic Blotter, sent me some fabulous photos of Red-winged Blackbirds, taken recently in the Chicagoland area. According to his email, “the Blackbirds have just arrived back in Chicago this weekend from their winter migration spots.”
Coincidentally, 8bb is also back in town after a substantial (and successful!) winter migration. We are in town for just two weeks, before taking off on an amazing 5-week-long, premiere-heavy cross-country extravaganza. Richmond VA, Waco TX, Middletown CT, Ann Arbor MI, San Francisco CA, Healsburg CA, Costa Mesa CA, New York NY, Greencastle IN. Check our schedule for more information, then come along and say gday!
We will truly be home to roost (apologies!) in Chicago for much of May, working for the University of Chicago on their Tomorrow’s Music Today series.
Below, TB muses on 8bb’s name:
BTW, I’m assuming that Wallace Stevens, being American, was writing about one of the common types of American blackbird, the Red-winged Blackbiurd in these picture being the most common of them. The only bird that is just called “Blackbird” and is actually completely black is the European Blackbird. But that doesn’t exist in the US. A lot of American birds have names similar to those of European birds because that’s what the first Europeans who arrived here associated them with, even though in many cases they aren’t even remotely related to the European original.
Comments 3
God, those are great pictures! They’re from the Chicago area? I don’t see any of them outside my window. Oh wait, it’s dark.
Re: Wallace Stevens, yes, he was from Connecticut. But my reading of the poem is that “blackbird” is an idea for him — he took a word that has few connotations other than common, simple, self-contained and -defining, and he placed that word/object in different situations. I think the result highlights the situations and the images they describe. Though it is fun to imagine one of these red-winged blackbirds in some northern mountain range, motionless but for one roaming eye.
Posted 18 Mar 2008 at 10:39 PM ¶Matt,
Yes, those are from the Chicago area. The top picture is from Montrose Harbor, the second from the Chicago Botanic Gardens. The males are all over the place. Several dozens in each location. You can hear their calls everywhere (wikipedia has a soundfile: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red-winged_blackbird). Haven’t seen any females yet.
Posted 19 Mar 2008 at 4:39 AM ¶well yesterday i saw 4 or 5 of the red-winged blackbirds in sabinal,texas i was so interested in how they looked so i decided to look it up………
Posted 17 May 2009 at 7:42 AM ¶Post a Comment