Stalking the Baltimore Oriole

A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.   -Maya Angelou

In the highways, in the hedges, I’ll be somewhere (searching) for my Lord.   -Maybelle Carter

On a spring day last year, I spent the good part of my morning stalking a Baltimore Oriole. It had arrived in my yard a few weeks earlier, just as crabapple blossoms were beginning to pop. He was singing somewhere high in the maple, or maybe it was the pine, at the back of the garden. I trained my binoculars up to the treetops and, at that very moment, he stopped singing. I waited a while, then went into the house which was, of course, when his delightful fluting song started up again. This happened two or three more times before I decided I would simply sit quietly outside and wait for the song. Maybe I could trick him into thinking I didn’t care and then, when he started again, I would get up slowly, turn around and find him at last!

I realize how ridiculous this must sound: that a bird cares whether I see it or not. But we birders are strange sorts of people.  We think nothing of slogging through mosquito breeding swamps to spot a flycatcher.  Or braking suddenly on a busy road, swerving to the shoulder and jumping out of the car because  it looked like the osprey had returned to her nest.

Yet because I will never tire of the glorious orange-and black plumage of the oriole, and how its return means warm weather has arrived at last, spotting it has become a rite of spring for me.

At the same time, I ask myself, “Having seen orioles many times before, why am I determined to see this particular one?”

In the woods nearby there’s a large hole in an old oak.  I believe it’s the home of the great horned owl that I hear on a late winter night. I long to see it  staring out at me some morning. When I  walk in those woods and see tracks in the snow, I’m fairly certain a deer has passed that way recently. Maybe I’ll see her if I am quiet and patient.

Why is this? Isn’t it enough just to give thanks for the haunting call in the middle of the night, for the silent presence of the deer?  Simply to sit and listen to the glorious trill of the oriole?

I think my search for God has been something like this. A few graced times in my life I have sensed God’s presence so strongly that if I just turned around, I would see her. I haven’t, of course, but maybe, next time. This notion is perhaps even more ridiculous than my need to see every oriole. After all, it is written clearly that no one shall look on the face of God and live.

Perhaps it’s time for me to stop looking. It’s time to recognize that God has been here for quite some time; on the soft skin of my baby granddaughter, in the strong, salty spray of the sea. God’s voice is in the wail of a jazz clarinet and the wall of sound from the pipe organ. I have tasted God’s sweetness in a perfect, ripe peach. I have touched God in a loved one’s arms.

And I have heard the oriole sing.