The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

by Margaret Renkl

According to birding tradition, the first bird you see on the first day of the new year sets the tone for your next twelve months.

Feel your feet solid on the Earth. You have already arrived. —Thich Nhat Hanh, How to Walk

To follow politics these days is to court bewilderment, denial, complete despair.

Too often I feel I am living in a country I no longer recognize, a country determined to imperil every principle I hold dear and many of the people I love, too.

Immersing myself in the natural world of my own backyard—or the nearby parks and greenways, or the woods surrounding our friends’ cabin on the Cumberland Plateau—is the ...

I’m not trying to hide from the truth but to balance it, to remind myself that there are other truths, too. I need to remember that the earth, fragile as it is, remains heartbreakingly beautiful. I need to give my attention to a realm that is indifferent to fretful human mutterings and naked ...

You can’t come back to something that is gone. —Richard Powers, The Overstory

I am thinking about time in both directions now—not just a future that will roll on without me, and without so many of the creatures I love, but a past I was not alive to remember.

A soul touched by the scent of turned soil or sun-warmed grass, a spirit moved by crickets singing in the grass, will spend a lifetime surrounded by wonder even as songbirds drop one by one from the poisoned sky and crickets fall silent in the poisoned grass.

Apocalyptic stories always get the apocalypse wrong. The tragedy is not the failed world’s barren ugliness. The tragedy is its clinging beauty even as it fails. Until the very last cricket falls silent, the beauty-besotted will find a reason to love the world.

But with biodiversity disappearing from every ecosystem on the planet, including our own, our preferences aren’t ethically equal. Lawns are a waste of precious water and soil because non-native landscaping like turf grass and boxwoods and crepe myrtles and Yoshino cherry trees provide little habitat or food for native wildlife.