Welcome to The Birds Are Calling. I’m Mario Pineda, an Edmonton-based natural historian, wildlife photographer, and writer. This blog grew out of years spent watching birds, carrying a camera, and paying closer attention to the natural world around me. Birds are usually where I begin, but they are rarely where my attention ends. Looking for them makes me notice the weather, the light, the landscape, the sky, the plants, and the other lives sharing the same place. Photography and writing are how I record what I find and try to understand it. Of all the labels, natural historian comes closest to describing what I do. Birds themselves offer an almost endless variety of forms, behaviours, colours, and voices. The Chilean Nobel Prize–winning poet Pablo Neruda expressed that fascination far more poetically than I ever could.
From the snowy peaks to the sandy banks, to the volcanoes, beaches, pastures, rivers, rocks, cornfields, roads, waves – everywhere, birds. Birds, little birds, big birds, colourful birds, rare birds! Still and spying, singing and whistling, sparkling with the golden glitter of the sun, blending in with ash or dusk.
And flying! Flying through the freedom of the air, swift like arrows or slow like ships. Flying in different ways, pushing apart the sky or cutting through it like a knife, or sometimes, in the midst of mass migration, filling the universe with the immense flow of a passing horde.
Desde lo nevado hasta lo arenoso, pasando por volcanes, playas, potreros, ríos, rocas, techos, trigales, carreteras, olas, por todas partes pájaros. Pájaros, pajarines, pajarrazos, pajarintus, pajaramenes! Inmóviles y acechantes, cantantes y silbantes, reluciendo al rayo de oro, confundiéndose con ceniza o crepúsculo.
Y volando! Volando en la libertad del aire, rápidos como flechas o lentos como naves. Volando con estilo diferente, apartando el cielo o atravesándolo con cuchillos, o a veces en la plenaria multitud de la migración llenando el universo con el inmenso fluir de la pajarería.
Gotta go, the birds are calling, so in the spirit of John Muir, I must go now and I will work on while I can, studying incessantly.
Studying nature in the Nalcahue wetlands (Chile).
