Category: Information

The monastery of Fontenay, in northern Burgundy, owes its fame to the reforming zeal of its twelfth-century founder, Saint Bernard, and to the sublime starkness of the abbey church’s Romanesque architecture.

What few visitors notice, though, is how the medieval monks’ landscaping efforts contribute to the birdiness of the place today.

The forests the monks so carefully maintained to provide fuel for their forge and the canals and reedy ponds they dug to supply the kitchens with fish are home to a full suite of central France’s migrant and breeding songbirds.

But the birds aren’t just outside. One of the few ornamental elements of the church is a thirteenth-century statue of the Virgin Mary and Christ Child, of the type known—fittingly enough in this case—as “beautiful Madonnas.”

Some visitors might walk right past it, pausing perhaps to admire the sweetness of the Virgin’s girlish face and the elegant curve of her torso; but a closer look reveals that the smiling Christ Child in her arms holds a live bird.

Stylized in form, and with no colorful plumage visible, the little bird is nevertheless identifiable: the Child’s pet can only be a European goldfinch. As the Smithsonian ornithologist Herbert Friedmann showed, that species served artists throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance as a symbol of the suffering and death to come.

The stone goldfinch is just like the feathered ones the twelfth-century monks would have seen flitting around the borders of the cloister garden, and it is just like the goldfinches we watch today on the woodland edges and flower-strewn lawns of Fontenay.

Here in Burgundy, and in so many other ancient places around the world, birds, art, and history come together to form a landscape that is far more than the sum of its separate parts. All it takes is the eye to see it.

 

 

It pleases me beyond belief that one of the most venerable of American bell manufacturers is called — get this — Verdin.

The company is not named for the penduline tit of the deserts, alas, but the coincidence got me thinking about a question that has bothered me for years — for decades, in fact.

What does it mean to say that a bird’s sounds are “bell-like”?

Compare the hollow clonking of a bearded bellbird

with the shirring trill of a Barrow’s goldeneye‘s wings

or the mock-ferocious tooting of a northern pygmy-owl.

Or even the staccato ticking of an excited verdin: all those sounds and many more are regularly described as “bell-like.”

They all are, I suppose, but the bells to which they are likened are all different ones. We have only the one word in English, unfortunately, “bell,” to describe the variety of noisemakers those birds’ sounds evoke, from the wooden thonk of the bellbird to the silvery jingle bell whistle of the goldeneye. Some other languages are better off here. Compare the German “Glockenvogel,” for example, for the bellbird with “Schellente” for the seaduck: the first rings like a church bell, the second sussurates in flight like distant sleigh bells.

This I can understand. And if we expand our definition of the bell just a little ways to include the triangle — that musical instrument so beloved of elementary school teachers and put to such good and witty use by Liszt — then it makes sense to me, too, to call the chips of verdins and black-throated sparrows “bell-like.”