Give me a dark holler
Where the sun don’t ever shine,
Where the wild birds of heaven
Can’t hear me when I whine.
Victoria Crowned Pigeon
I remember those lyrics from a hillbilly song when I was young. Call it country and western if you like, but that term is way to broad from what we used to listen to. I’m talking more up a holler than Nashville. Not southern, folk, rockabilly or bluegrass. I mean Grandpa Jones, Stringbean, and Hank Snow at the outside edge.
Odd thing is – with all the search engine technology out there I could find no record of such a song or it’s lyrics. A Google search does show the second place I recall seeing that rhyme (slightly different wording) – a short story, The Wild Birds of Heaven, in Richard Brautigan’s Revenge of the Lawn. A caver friend, Bill Prewitt, gave me that book when I was in college. The story deals with a frustrated father whose wife has sided with the kids: ”Get a new television set for the kids. What are you: some kind of human monster?”
The phrase wild birds of heaven seems to have been around for a while. It appears in a 1940 Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal report where the author claims to have been to a site never trodden before by human foot and rarely by the wild birds of heaven. In 1845, Frances Browne said in The Late Mrs. James Gray (Harry Houdini Collection Congress) that the wild birds of heaven were companions of whose converse dear Mrs’ Grey could never grow weary.
The wild birds of heaven shown here actually reside in the heavenly San Diego Wild Animal Park. They had to boot me out of the African Aviary at closing time.
Ringed Teal
Red-knobbed Hornbill
Eastern Hammerkop
