When the snow finally melted, when it finally finally finally melted, I walked outside onto the deck and watched the sunrise. I watched it move slowly, out of time, up over the edge of the world, turning the sky a million shades of pink and yellow. I hadn’t bothered to put on any shoes and felt the overnight cold seep up into my ankles. I didn’t even care. The landscape had returned to its rightful colors.
It startled me at first to hear the birds. The last week had been preternaturally quiet, as though the snow had muted the entire world. But here they were, chirping and calling and singing the morning into existence. I pulled my phone out of the pocket of my robe and opened the bird song identification app.
The screen refreshed rapidly, recording the sounds of crows in the distance high above the fields, a jay and a cardinal playfully arguing from the low limbs of the sycamore tree, a gentle wren whispering from the eaves of the carport, and a mournful dove nested deep in the branch.
It took me a minute to recognize the next sound as the voice of a bird. It sounded a little like the opening of a potato chip bag, like the crinkle of cellophane. The app identified it as the call of the Common Grackle.
I keep a list of each new bird I hear at Sandhill. To confirm that I had not, in fact, heard the grackle before, I flipped through the pages of the little leather book where I keep the list. I had not realized how many of the birds I recorded are identified as “common.” There is the Common Ground Dove, the Common Yellowthroat, and the Common Loon. And now the Common Grackle.
I stared at the list and reflected on all the mornings, in every season, that I have stood or sat silently and listened to the choir of avian voices. Not once have I heard anything common, anything ordinary. Not once have I gone back inside unmoved by the marvel of bird song. How could anyone hear the faint coo of a dove and think it common? Who could listen to the sustained minor chord of the loon and not think it extraordinary? Why isn’t there a Lyrical Grosbeak or a Coloratura Thrush?
There is, of course, another definition for the word “common.” In addition to meaning well-known or familiar, common also means belonging to more than one person or to all the members of a group, as in “common ground” or “common interests,” not subject to individual ownership or control. This usage carries with it a sense of beneficence, of doing good, or promoting the interest of not just oneself, but of others as well. It carries a sense of sharing.
Not in a social media sense, which is far too often fueled by the intent to disseminate untruths or appropriate someone else’s creative efforts, but in the kindergarten sense, the assumption that anything is better when experienced alongside another person.
Perhaps that is what the ornithological namers meant. Perhaps, instead of their labels being intended to segregate birds into factions, they wanted the Common Goldeneye and the Common Grouse and the Common Gallinule to be reminders that none of us possesses the world, that none of us can lay claim to any of its beauty and wonder to the exclusion of anyone else, that what we occasionally experience as sacred astonishment is the thread that connects us all.
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