Bird People

(Day 5 – Aigues-Mortes > Béziers – 4 July 2025 – 114 km, 345 m)

Someone I love and admire refers to birds as people. Spot on. Birds can be just as skittish, childish, churlish, industrious, conniving, whimsical, creative, loving, hushed and garrulous, handsome and unsightly, social and anti-social as we featherless, wingless, generally land-bound bipeds. Catching the full breadth of their skills, quirks, habits, squawks, peeps and madrigals demands practice and patience (even with the ubiquitous city pigeon), neither a trait I have deliberately honed to this point.

And now I find myself in a parallel universe, on an endless journey. “Look,” they wink coquettishly at me. “Listen,” they chant. I comply.

I remove the sleek travel binoculars bought before embarking on this journey that reside in my handlebar bottle bag (in lieu of water) at least twice a day now, often more, for many minutes.

Here I am. I am here. I am admiring you, my dear flamingos and crows and common black birds, my beautiful cirl buntings and ibises, storks and cormorants, Eurasian magpies, blackcaps, starlings, sparrows and swallows, just staring at you, spying you, trying to identify you by your plumage or sounds or flight pattern, listening, allowing myself to study one or two of you with particular focus every day.

And as I study you, my winged wonders, I memorize a long, twenty-one stanza poem in a language still somewhat foreign to me that makes no mention of you, and yet is entirely you. Unlike our quick glances, dear birds, I need no binoculars to follow my poem, and yet, just like your melodious calls, to retain my beloved poem, I invite her lyrical words to gently perch somewhere within, take refuge in my heart.

My poem and my birds soar to the edge of my ever changing horizon, and I deliberately (falteringly and inconsistently) now hone patience and practice.