Bird Study

We are in the midst of studying the common birds of Michigan, and we look forward to the North American Bird Count in February!  Kent Martin, from the Kalamazoo Audubon Society, will join us for this fun adventure!  We will head out into our backyard and identify and count all the birds we see and hear, and then we will post our findings online with thousands of other citizen scientists.  It's a fun nonfiction reading and writing activity with the bonus of learning about common backyard birds!

Poem For The Day

                   

The Sonnets To Orpheus: XIX

By Rainer Maria Rilke

Though the world keeps changing its form
as fast as a cloud, still
what is accomplished falls home
to the Primeval.

Over the change and the passing,
larger and freer,
soars your eternal song,
god with the lyre.

Never has grief been possesed,
never has love been learned,
and what removes us in death

is not revealed.
Only the song through the land
hallows and heals.

(Translated by Stephen Mitchell)

In this ever changing world, there is forever a constant mystery that perhaps is best captured in the "primeval" because the "primeval" captures nothing... We hear it in the songs of birds and in the whispering of the wind.  We glimpse it in the snowfall and the woods. We feel it in our hearts.   It is a beautiful mystery that is beyond us and yet it is the very thing that grounds us.  It is what "hallows and heals."  If this sounds foreign, it is only because I lack the words. If you venture out into the woods today, breathe in and listen.