A Roc for Christmas (Annual Bird Count)

Eric Pape, Rukh Carrying Off Its Prey (1923)

Eric Pape, Rukh carries off its prey (1923)

Sports Saturday

I don’t know whether bird watching is officially considered a sport but, what with Christmas falling on a “Sports Saturday,” let’s say it is.  That way I have an excuse for writing about the annual Christmas bird count. Every year, between the middle of December and the first week in January, bird watchers around the globe organize outings to count birds.  As a result, they are able to provide data that allows scientists to chart environmental trends. The numbers are of course approximate: while ospreys are easy to track, do you know how challenging it is to count 300+ starlings in a field?  You can read about the event here.

I am currently visiting my parents, and my birdwatching father alerted me to a poem of his that I did not know about.  In my father’s fanciful imagination, a couple of Christmas bird watchers report seeing a roc (or rukh), the mythical bird from the Arabian Nights that is so large that it can carry off elephants. And why shouldn’t they have seen one? It is, after all, the season of miracles.

Here’s the poem:

A Roc for Christmas

By Scott Bates

It came as something of a shock
When George and May put down “One roc”
On the list of the annual Christmas count
Of our Audubon Club in Marymount–
But they weren’t kidding. They were serious
And didn’t hear jokes from the rest of us
Like “you got rocs in your head?” or “where’s the djinn?”
Or “where in the heck have you two been?”
–Or whether they’d seen too much Jim Crow
Or an ornithological UFO–
They were in a daze. Oblivious.
In the garbage dump at five o’clock
George and May had seen a roc.

George saw it first. He was coming around
The fence at the village dumping ground
In gathering dusk when he cried aloud
As something rose up like a great gold cloud
Or like the sun—but it wasn’t the sun
(Which just at that moment was going down),
It was a hawk—a
humongous hawk,
A hawk as big as a city block,
With golden wings and a silver tail
And a body as big as a humpbacked whale
And a glow on its wings of a million lights
Like the stars in all the Arabian Nights
And a sound in its wings like the rising sea
And a crest like a blazing Christmas tree
With a flashing eye that became a star
Like the star that was followed by Balthazar
As it flew away with tremendous speed
“To the court of the Caliph Haroun el Raschid,”
Said May with a shiver. And she was sure
That it left behind it a scent of myrrh. . . .

–Well, no one believed them. But we could see
They had had
some sort of epiphany,
And we felt a kind of sadness then
Like the feeling you had at the age of ten
When you knew that you’d never believe again;
So we left the roc on the record to stay–
For, whatever the sighting of George and May,
They gave
us a sighting that you can bet
The Audubon Club won’t soon forget. . . .

May you have your own epiphanies this holiday season.  Merry Christmas.

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