Tag Archives: music

Strike A Pose

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Ravens4756

Music plays a large part in a birds life. They sing it. They listen to it. They have favorites. And those of you who have ever been outside and heard a bird sing you know they love it. But there are birds who can’t sing. Through some horrible genetic accident they can’t sing a note. Like these ravens. They can’t sing and when they try they all sound like Tom Waits after a night at the piano and a carton of Lucky Strikes. So what do they do? They’re birds. Music is their life.

Many choose to do something completely different. Ravens have a rep for being really smart, like Mensa smart, and they are incredible problem solvers. One time I was in Yellowstone, in the parking lot at Old Faithful Lodge and a whole band of bikers had parked their bikes near the entrance and gone in. A raven spent a full 10 minutes figuring out how to unzip the saddlebag on the back of one of the bikes then carefully pulled out what looked like stripper underwear, piece by piece. As it would pull out each piece, each one naughtier than the next, the crowd that had gathered around would let out a cheer. This seemed to encourage the raven to dig deeper and it didn’t stop until every single piece was out of the bag and lying on the ground. There was a Vegas sticker on the back of the bike so I guess whatever happened in Vegas didn’t stay there. In any event it shows that ravens like to be in the limelight.

I had stopped at an overlook to check things out and another car there had their radio playing, loudly, way too loudly for Yellowstone anyway, and as fate would have it Madonna was playing. She was doing that song Vogue and after a few choruses of Strike a Pose this ravens latent musical abilities had to find release somehow. It too began striking a pose and didn’t stop until enough other visitors had threatened to lynch the radio player and he turned the radio off. This just goes to show that you can’t mess with genetics. This raven couldn’t sing but it could let out, that musical expression it had, in the only way it knew. In dance. Sure it was a quiet dance, not very exuberant but not exactly sedate either, but it still allowed it to release that pent-up musical energy we know is in every bird. I just wish the radio playing guy had been playing James Brown’s “I Feel Good” instead. Would that have been cool or what? For those of you who’ve been living under a rock for the last 75 years and don’t know “I Feel Good” here’s what it sounds like.

I bet ravens from all over the park would come to join in.  Now that would be something to see.

Sounds of Sunrise

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Inspiration Point  Bryce National park  click to enlarge

This is Bryce National Park and something incredible happens here when the conditions are perfect. Something that doesn’t happen in any of the other national parks. I have talked to visitors who have come here for years upon years and they have never experienced it. Park staff who have worked here and have seen almost every scenario the park offers have never heard it. It is reserved for those who have that special ability to experience things on levels the average visitor doesn’t. Those who have only time enough to observe briefly before they move on to the next experience miss one the most magnificent occurrences in nature.

It doesn’t take any particular skill, unless you count being still and listening a skill. You don’t have to be incredibly trained or highly educated. What you do have to have however is an open mind and an acceptance of the possibility that there is beauty in nature that sometimes can not be explained. To experience this for yourself you need to prepare by meeting the following conditions.

You need to be out on very cold mornings and by cold I mean around zero or below. It doesn’t work if it’s warm, the rays are simply absorbed by the already warm stone. It was -9° this morning before sunrise, cold enough that the stone almost rang of its own accord. Your breath would hang in the air as a solid cloud of mist, looking like a colorless version of the Aurora Borealis that you could see in the daytime before gently floating away. You need to be in the proper spot and the spot this morning was in front of the formation seen in this image. To my knowledge it has no formal name but after a while you get so you can predict if this is one of those special constructions that will perform. Then you need a cloudless day so that the sun can fulfill its obligation. That’s it. All you need to do now is stand very still and wait.

As the sun rises high enough so that its individual rays begin to strike the individual stones and their respective columns a sound is heard, faint at first but then louder as the suns strength begins to grow. The power of the light racing down the rays to strike each stone with the exact amount of force needed causes each note produced to be crystal clear and pure and sustain itself just the exact amount of time to be perfect in the music that is to follow. By some unknown miracle the columns and formations and individual stones are placed in just such away that music forms in a recognizable way with the notes always forming and sounding according to the order in which the light hits them and the music demands.

This formation plays a minor piece by Mozart, I forget the name, but it is played in a way that no human orchestra could possible replicate. I call it the Sounds of Sunrise. There are no human-made instruments that can make music as pure as this. It doesn’t last long as the sun rises quickly and if you are unlucky enough to have interruptions due to passers-by you may miss it. But this morning there were no interruptions, it was too cold and the spot you needed to be to experience this phenomenon was too far from the designated viewing area so the occasional viewers there were not curious enough to walk down to see what one lone visitor was looking at so the conditions were perfect. The stone was there, the sun was there and the music was there. And so was I.