Lembke, Janet

Janet Lembke's nature essays have appeared in Audubon Magazine. She is also the author of River Time and Looking for Eagles. A scholar and translator, she divides her time between the shores of the Lower Neuse, in North Carolina and Staunton, Virginia.

I . . . suspect that mockers grab space just for the hell of it, for the sheer, flapdoodling fun of chasing away all that dare cross the invisible boundary that separates the bird's kingdom from everything else. Dangerous Birds, 1992.

Shell on the grass, no grackle in sight: Spring to spring, the year has come round, and the grackle, too, has circled around, meeting itself. Ibid.

With bodies more than a yard long and wings that may spread at full stretch to seven feet, brown pelicans are not dainty birds. Attaining lift-off from the water calls for a gawky, slapdash run on super-sized webbed feet. Ibid.

Always I seem to be on the outside looking in - not a worthless place to be, a rewarding place in fact, kaleidoscopic with color, sounds, and movements, but also one that's faintly shadowed by a longing for something lost, for a homeland from which I and my kind are barred. Ibid.

What do I want? The whole works, that's all. Connections. Fusion. Blood ties. Oneness with the rest of creation. Ibid.

As an integral part of the natural process, as an organism firmly within the whole, I also grow, change, and triumph. I am myself - not mockingbird, monarch butterfly, nor brier - and that is enough. Ibid.

Of all the higgledy-piggledy parts, only my species has cognizance of possibility and thus lacks innocence. Ibid.