Editorial – The Rural Life – Native Element – NYTimes.com

Editorial – The Rural Life – Native Element – NYTimes.com.

When I was farming birds were a constant in my daily goings on.

Early in the morning, before the sun came up, I could hear sleepy barn swallows peeping to each other.

As I walked the cows back to the barn from their night pasture the morning birds would be talking about the sunrise.

I would look out my barn door facing the sunrise and the cedar swamp and see in the early morning summer mist sand hill cranes ‘grazing’ and sometimes dancing.

Hawks and eagles soar above, sea gulls stalk the tractor as I would kick over the windrow of hay to dry so we could bale in the afternoon.  They were looking for voles and snakes, a supplement to their scavenging the beaches.

And at the end of the day, I would walk the cows up to their new night pasture, leading my girls, and listen to the red wing blackbirds hanging off stalks of hay, whiporwills on the fence-rows and those swallows dive bombing mosquitoes, peep peep=ing all the while.