Now hear the song of Neornis, the crown bird,
Deinos' last surviving heir—
The feathered dinosaur whose word
Of morning filled the Paleocene air
With the first music of the new world.
For Neornis was Deinos' child—remember this:
Every bird that sings is a dinosaur, furled
In feathers, and the morning's kiss
Of birdsong is the Mesozoic's voice
Continuing—the theropod line
That did not end but made the choice
Of wings and seed and the design
Of flight perfected over the Cretaceous sky
Now flew into the empty Cenozoic
And filled it—everywhere the eye
Could see, the avian and heroic
Radiation of the birds began.
Into every niche
The dinosaurs had left, the feathered clan
Expanded—from the ocean's ditch
To the highest mountain, from the deepest forest
To the open grassland, birds became
The most diverse of all warm-blooded chorused
Vertebrates—and the game
Of adaptation found in birds its greatest
Range of form: the hummingbird at three grams
And the ostrich at three hundred pounds—the latest
And most varied of all the diagrams
That evolution drew from a single body plan.
Gastornis was among the first to claim
The empty throne of the theropod—this began
In the Paleocene's forests, where the name
Of terror bird was earned: a flightless giant
Standing two meters tall, with a beak
That crushed bone—the self-reliant
And enormous predator, the peak
Of what a bird becomes when there is no
Competing mammal large enough to challenge
The ground—Gastornis ruled the show
Of the early Paleocene, the balance
Of power still uncertain, the crown
Of apex predator still unclaimed
By any mammal—and the bird looked down
On the mouse and the shrew and remained
For a time the master of the forest floor.
But the birds' true genius was not the giant—
It was the small, the many, the core
Of diversity that the compliant
And flexible body plan allowed.
Passeros—the songbirds—radiated
In the Eocene like an exploding cloud
Of melody: the oscines created
The syrinx's double-chambered instrument
That could produce two notes at once—
A biological accomplishment
That no other vertebrate confronts
Or matches—and with this instrument
The songbird filled the forest canopy
With territories of pure intent,
Invisible to the eye but a symphony
To the ear: each male a composer
Of his own inherited and learned
Variations—for the songbird's closure
Of territory was the song, which burned
No energy of combat but drew lines
Of sound across the forest, and the bird
Who sang the most complex designs
Won the mate—and the absurd
And beautiful consequence was that natural
Selection made the world's first musicians:
The forest filled with the magical
And competitive auditions
Of ten thousand species singing.
The raptors took the sky—Aquilos'
Sharp-eyed hunters, the wing-spreading and the clinging
To the thermal columns, the close
And patient circling of the eagle
And the hawk and the falcon, whose speed
In the stoop exceeded any legal
Limit of the vertebrate's need
For velocity—the peregrine at two
Hundred miles per hour, the fastest
Animal alive, the blue
And burning descent—the contrast
Between the patient thermal-riding wait
And the explosive killing dive was the raptor's
Art: to make of the sky's real estate
A hunting ground, and the bird's chapters
In the history of predation wrote
The sky into the territory of fear.
And the waterbirds: the penguin's coat
Of insulation through the southern hemisphere,
The albatross's wingspan over the ocean,
The pelican's pouch, the flamingo's filter—
Every body of water in slow motion
Colonized by the avian kilter
Of adaptation—for wherever water lay,
A bird was already there, adapted
To its salinity, its depth, its way
Of yielding food—the bird had mapped it.
Honor Neornis—the dinosaur who flies,
Who sings, who dives, who wades, who runs—
The theropod whose feathered guise
Outlasted all of Deinos' other sons
And carries the Mesozoic forward
In every dawn chorus, every migration,
Every egg in every nest—the skyward
Continuation of the oldest nation
Of the archosaurs: the bird is the dinosaur
Perfected, the dinosaur distilled
To feather, song, and flight—and nothing more
Is needed, and the morning world is filled.