White-faced ibis on the move
Small groups of white-faced ibis (Plegadis chihi) can be found in our wildlife refuges throughout the year, but from time to time large flocks of the birds migrate into Texas to breed and winter along the Gulf Coast. Moving around from day to day in search of water that’s the right depth for feeding, they frequent agricultural fields and freshwater marshes like those at the Brazoria Wildlife Refuge, where they forage through the mud in search of insects, snails, crawfish, frogs, and fish.
A reddish-brown bird often described as ‘chestnut colored,’ white-faced ibis sport varying amounts of green and purple iridescence on their heads and bodies, while reddish legs and a red eye help to distinguish them from the similar glossy ibis. In flight, their iridscence can be quite striking; enlarging the photo at the top makes that feature more visible. (The smaller birds flying with them may be grackles, or brown-headed cowbirds. They were quite numerous; I counted fourteen or fifteen in this photo.)
A closer view of that splendid iridescence
Seeing the flock of ibis rising up from a Brazoria marsh, I remembered a favorite from among Wendell Berry’s poems. Like the birds in his poem titled “The Wild,” they seemed as wild as leaves, and a reminder of the value of what is.
In the empty lot,
A place not natural but wild,
Among the trash of human absence,
The slough and shamble of the city’s seasons,
A few old locusts bloom.
A few woods birds fly and sing in the new foliage.
Warblers and tanagers. Birds wild as leaves.
In a million each one would be rare, new to the eyes.
A man couldn’t make a habit of such color, such flight and singing.
But they are the habit of this wasted place.
In them, the ground is wise.
They are its remembrance of what it is.
That said, the sight of the flock evoked more than poetry. Visually, it reminded me of a work by M.C. Escher: a 1938 woodcut titled “Day and Night.”
“Day and Night” woodcut in black and grey ~ M. C. Escher
Printed from two blocks, “Day and Night” employs a technique called tessellation: an intricate pattern of interlocking, repeated shapes that fit together without gaps or overlaps. A hallmark of Escher’s work, his tessellations often featured intricate patterns from the natural world such as birds, fish, and reptiles; the optical illusions he created transformed quite real creatures into something wholly unexpected.
In Day and Night, Escher’s black birds morph into white, and white birds into black, as they move between daylight and night. The landscape itself accentuates the symmetry; land on one side of the river is sunlit, while the other side is shown in the falling darkness of evening.
Escher called tessellation his “richest source of inspiration,” and Day and Night eventually became one of his most popular prints. Reflecting on his technique, Escher wrote in a 1940 letter to G.H.s-Gravesande:
My little birds, little fish and frogs cannot be described: all they ask for is to be thought through, they ask for a mode of thought that I have found to be present in only very few people. It is a kind of small philosophy that has nothing to do with literature, a pleasure in arranging forms and in giving meaning to each part of the plane. It has much more to do with music than with literature.”
Despite Escher’s convictions about his own work, his prints have given rise to a number of poetic reflections on his use of space. In “Bird Perfect,” Andrew Spacey offers one view of what I once experienced as an Escherian flock.
These birds emerging into night
are mirrored by the birds of day,
echo backwards into light,
come forward out of darkest grey.The land jigsaws into the birds
and shapes their flight away from mind
as sound is captured by the words
to pattern sense for humankind.Order out of chaos seems
an impossibility, yet these birds
emerge out of their own dreams,
achieving perfection with ease.
The Task at Hand 