Bird Archive
Project Map: Coordinates
The Archives
“Delight is as the flight –” —E. Dickinson, Fr317
Poem Archive
“In contrast to the things that sing / Not Birds entirely – but Minds –” —E. Dickinson, Fr1545B
Scope
The Poem Archive shelters 350 manuscript facsimiles representing over 230 poems composed by Dickinson and marked by the presence of birds. [1]
Manuscripts
Every poem gathered here appears on a virtual leaf with, whenever possible, a digital facsimile of its manuscript. Currently, only those manuscript leaves/surfaces containing writing are presented; a later iteration of Dickinson’s Birds will present all surfaces to enable a fuller visualization of each manuscript’s physical structure.
MS Dating
The dates assigned here derive pricipally from R. W. Franklin’s 1998 variorum The Poems of Emily Dickinson. [2] Since the Poem Archive is an archive of Manuscripts rather than Works, moreover, the dates assigned are to each manuscript witness of a given work rather than to the work itself—i.e., the manuscript of a draft will bear the composition date; the manuscript of a copy will bear the copying date; and the manuscript of a poem circulated to a recipient will bear the circulation date. When no manuscript is extant, but the poem is accessible in an early (C19) printed source, the date given is the date of its printing.
The temporal focus of this project—the importance of the seasons [3]—has led us to treat the more general dates assigned by Franklin in the following way: poems assigned to “late” in the year are assigned to fall; poems assigned to “early” in the year are assigned to winter. We have not attempted to assign poems dated “first half of the year” or “second half of the year” to a specific season.
Headnotes
Headnotes identify the manuscript by archive catalog number and Franklin variorum number and offer information, when known, on the manuscript’s date of composition, copying, or circulation; its medium (ink, pencil, ink+ pencil); its state (draft, fair copy, fair copy–revised); its setting in Dickinson’s archive (bound; unbound); its paper type [4]; and its circulation status (retained or sent). In cases where a manuscript has circulated, the recipient/s is/are identified and further information about them reported. All manuscripts affiliated with a given poem are identified and linked.
In addition to textual and bibliographical information, each poem is also accompanied by a list of the birds it names. In instances where a specific bird is identified, an audio file of the sound of the bird is included and a link to the Bird Archive enables further tracking of the bird both inside and outside Dickinson’s work and century. In instances where unnamed birds appear in a poem, a link opens to the Bird Archive as a whole.
Transcriptions
In transcribing Dickinson’s poems our aim has been to render as precisely and accurately as possible in the typographic medium Dickinson’s orthography, punctuation, and physical line and stanza breaks, as well as the disposition of her writing across leaves and other surfaces. In carrying out this work we consciously engaged two vital reading traditions: the manuscript tradition in which Dickinson worked exclusively during her lifetime, and the print tradition in which her work was widely disseminated and read after her death. [5]
Our engagement with the manuscript tradition is registered in our inclusion—foregrounding—of the material faces of Dickinson’s manuscripts via digital facsimiles as well as in our practice of transcribing directly from manuscript sources whenever possible. In those instances where Dickinson’s “bird” poems share space on a MS surface with other poems not referencing birds, and in cases where “bird” poems are embedded within letters and letter drafts, the entire MS is transcribed. When a “bird” poem is embedded in a longer text, a “glow” effect in the transcription makes it readily identifiable.
Our engagement with the print tradition is reflected in our decision to prepare limited diplomatic transcriptions of these works rather than fully typographic facsimiles. We also deploy typographical forms and editorial symbols for a clarity of presentation that, perhaps paradoxically, also highlights the non-identity of print and manuscript productions.
Our transcriptions are presented on spectral panes that exist “behind” the facsimile images until called to the foreground by the reader. Like the C19 bird-blinds that were their inspiration, the panes are designed to convey our simultaneous sense of closeness and remoteness from Dickinson, her scene of writing, and her original authorial intentions. [6]
Searching the Poem Archive
Navigation in the archives of Dickinson’s Birds is designed to be intuitive, with every reader/seeker finding their singular way among its offerings.
The default arrangement of the Poem Archive is alphabetical by first line.
The chronology of Dickinson’s bird poems is discoverable via three search options: poem MSS dated to a certain year are searchable by year; poem MSS assigned to a specific season are searchable by season; and poem MSS assigned to a specific month are searchable by month.
Alternate search parameters allow readers to curate the poems via their material setting in or beyond Dickinson’s private archive: Readers may search for bound (fascicle) manuscripts; unbound manuscripts of three forms (those composed on bifolium sheets designated by R. W. Franklin as belonging to “sets”; those on loose bifolium sheets or stray leaves; and those on ephemeral substrates, e.g., envelopes, fragments of paper bags, etc. ), and for circulated manuscripts by recipient/s. Searches by MS state (draft, fair copy, fair copy, with revisions); medium (ink, pencil, ink + pencil); and enclosures are also possible. Finally, users may search for manuscripts alluding to general and specific environmental phenomena and key avian behaviors. [7]
The search bar allows for exact phrase searches of the transcriptions of Dickinson’s poems; it also allows users to search by Franklin number, e.g., Fr359B.
For detailed information on the Poem Archive, including information on Sources and Editorial Symbols, see also Poem Archive Notes.
Bird Archive
“How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, /Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?” —
Scope
C19
Together these lists suggest the boundaries of the 19th-century’s formal knowledge of Amherst’s and Western Massachusetts’s birds. Now cultural artifacts as much scientific records, these early Field Guides also bear witness to the habits of mind of the observers who made them in an era when Nature was still the Book of Nature. Emmons’s, Allen’s, and Clark’s often telegraphic notes marking, among other things, the first sightings of a bird in spring—“Bobolink. 4 April. Miss Morse” (Clark 1887)—and the last glimpses of it in autumn leaving for its wintering range—“Passes south in November” (Clark 1887)—offer tiny archives of feeling.
C20
By the 20th century, ornithology had evolved into a rigorous scientific discipline, a development reflected in the increasing breadth and depth of available data as well as in changes in the ways data was gathered and reported. While many fine sources were now available to us, we selected as our principal source of data Aaron Clark Bagg and Samuel Atkins Eliot Jr.’s 1937 Birds of the Connecticut Valley in Massachusetts originally published in Northampton, Mass., by The Hampshire Bookshop and available digitally through the HathiTrust. Unfolding over 800 pages and including entries on 268 species, this work offers a deep ornithological history of the region composed via the collation of more than a hundred years of observations recorded by earlier natural historians. To this historical information, Bagg and Eliot add their own, thus inscribing themselves into the record of a world still balanced between subjectivity and empiricism: “Jan. 16, 1931, [a snowy owl] was sighted at sundown flying from Hadley Bridge southward: a huge, white bird flapping silently and low over the still white glistening fields against the purple of Mt. Holyoke in the fast-falling winter twilight” (314). First printed when the Passenger Pigeon H. L. Clark had called “common near Amherst” in the spring of 1888 had been extinct for almost a quarter century, but also a full quarter century before the wide-spread cultural imagination of a silent spring would take hold, this guide is also a key transitional work between two centuries that now seem lightyears apart.
Since Bagg and Eliot’s work is regional rather than local and includes more birds than those inhabiting or passing through Amherst, we have used David Fischer’s “Annotated List of 234 Amherst Birds,” in Peter Westover’s Birds and Their Habitats in Amherst, Massachusetts with Complete Annotated List of Amherst Birds published by The Hitchcock Center for the Environment, 1977 to determine the birds from Bagg and Eliot’s record represented here.
C21
In the twenty-first century, in place of the small, rare epiphanies that were the typical rewards of thousands of hours of solitary fieldwork by 19th- and early 20th-century natural historians and ornithologists, come vast datasets collected by non-human radar networks continually scanning the skies for birds. [10] For 21st-century data, we too have cast our mist-net into the virtual environment, sifting resources including the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home) and Birds of the World (https://birdsoftheworld.org/bow/home) as well as regional sources including The Massachusetts Avian Records Committee State List , the Mass Audubon Breeding Bird Atlas 1 Species Accounts, and Wayne R. Petersen and Brian E. Small’s Field Guide to Birds of Massachusetts, published by Scott & Nix, Inc., 2017.
We focus, however, on small, local data, drawing again on David Fischer’s “Annotated List of 234 Amherst Birds,” in Peter Westover’s Birds and Their Habitats in Amherst, Massachusetts with Complete Annotated List of Amherst Birds (Amherst: Hitchcock Center for the Environment, 1977), and, since this list is still a C20 list, albeit a late C20 list, on the Amherst College Bird Survey of 2008, to determine the birds of our C21 list. This “small” data—what we call “sparrow data”—also reveals a new and urgent need to count and care for the least of things, for birds and poems. [11]
Sound & Sonogram Files
The website https://xeno-canto.org/, created in 2005 by Bob Planque and William-Pier Vellinga, and administrated by the Netherlands-based Xeno-canto foundation (Stichting Xeno-canto voor natuurgeluiden), is the primary source of the sound and sonogram files used in Dickinson’s Birds. Xeno-canto is committed to education, conservation, and science, and their recordings are shared under various Creative Commons licenses that generally allow distribution provided recordists are credited and provided no commercial proceeds are sought. We are deeply grateful to XenoCanto for their mission and generous dissemination of bird sounds: without their vast archive, our tiny one would not exist. A complete list of recordists and recordings may be found in the Bird Archive Notes. [12]
Searching the Bird Archive
“It is rare for a bird to leave evidence, even fleetingly, of how it has moved through the world.” —Tim Dee, A Year on the Wing
Bird files are searchable by species’ common names; appearance on Dickinson’s ‘bird list’—i.e., the list we have constructed from the wild songbirds she named in her poems; and current (C21) conservation status.
More detailed information on the birds, including notes on habitat and nest materials as well as historical field notes from observers, appears on the individual Bird Pages. Links on these pages allow users access to those manuscripts in Dickinson’s oeuvre linked with a specific bird species (“Affiliated Manuscripts”). From the individual Bird Pages users may also access sound files and spectrographs of the calls or songs of the birds.
For detailed information on the Bird Archive, including Sources, see also Bird Archive Notes.
Meshwork in the Archives
“The Flickering be seen –” —E. Dickinson, Fr495
Environmental Phenomena in the Poem Manuscripts
Among other things, the Archives encourage our attunement to the ways in which Dickinson’s poems evoke the world(s) around her and to her complex, sometimes uncanny experience of emplacement. Our data mining of the poems reflects their relationship to scale, place, motion, time, and sound. In addition to marking the poems’ direct allusions to Universe/s, World/s, and Nature/s, we report their references to specific Solar Bodies, Landforms, Flora and Fauna, Matter (organic and inorganic), Meteorological and Atmospheric processes, and Temporal increments (moments, hours, days, seasons, years) not experienced exclusively by humans but more generally in and by nature. These phenomena appear here in small data clouds streaming out beside the poem manuscripts. Like the variant word lists often found drifting below Dickinson’s poems, some of which appear as “collapsing glosses” of the poems, these clouds refocus our attention on the manifold data of the world flowing in and out of Dickinson’s works. They take the place traditionally reserved for transcriptions, which now open in another pane when accessed by users. [13]
Unmarked
Explorations of agency and alterity are at the very core of all of Dickinson’s writings and also at the core of these selected works: Everywhere in her poems we find “strange strangers,” sometimes colliding with one another, sometimes turning toward or into the other, sometimes just passing by each other without ever touching at all. Although we do not attempt to mark the infinite traces of “strange strangers” in these works for fear of domesticating their movements and revolutions in form, we hope that our first, exploratory tagging of the phenomena listed above will lead readers ever more deeply into the complex meshwork of Dickinson’s world and the others that flicker within it.
The Data Firmament
“And Firmaments – row –” — E. Dickinson, Fr124C
The Data Firmament is an experiment in speculative worlding. In the Firmament, fragmentary data of a site-in-time—the atmospheric phenomena chronicled by nineteenth-century keepers of Amherst’s weather records for the year 1864; the calls and songs of the birds whose names were noted by nineteenth-century natural historians traversing the region before ornithology was recognized as a science mixed, fleetingly, with those sounds composed by the Valley’s pre- and post-Industrial Revolution technologies; and the constellations made by Dickinson’s 350 poems alluding to birds—are translated into visualizations and present soundings. In the Data Firmament, immersive, intuitive modes of thinking and perception are the finest guides. Here, birds and poems are no longer known a priori as bounded unities but encountered as dispersed vitalities. Following them means falling—falling into unforeseen relations, into the currents of cross-species sympathies, into depth and time as multiple. In the Firmament, birds, poems, and weather simultaneously conjure a memory of an old unknown world where the sound of the Anthropocene was still a sub-sub song in the bright Book of Nature and row out to meet a new unknown world approaching us from the distant future.
Data Visualizations
Weather
Upon first opening the Firmament a horizon line appears, dividing the space into Day and Night, World and No-World. In the space above the horizon, a firmamental arc marks the upper limit of the archive-world’s expanse; below the horizon, an inverse shadow arc appears in the streaming dark that might scroll on forever. To activate the Firmament, the visitor taps the play-bar below just below the horizon line. Now a small glowing wheel materializes and begins its circuit across the seasons of the archive-world.
The atmospheric data of the Firmament is drawn from The Snell Meteorological Journal, a five volume record of the weather from 1835 to 1902 kept by Ebenezer Strong Snell, professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Amherst College, and his daughter Sabra Clark Snell. [14] Specifically, we have mined data from the year 1864, that kairotic moment in Dickinson’s itinerary when she bound the final fascicle and entered a new period of poetic surge outside these gatherings, perhaps outside gathering itself. In the sky-screen above the horizon, the “there is” of climate, time, and weather is indicated by the changing colors of the skies representing fluctuations in average monthly temperatures; by visual representations of the month’s dominant genres of clouds; and by the drift-patterns of the birds suggesting the action of winds. [15] The daily measurements of rain (blue line) and snow (pink line) fall are captured in graphs running along the horizon line. And above and below the horizon line, lightning, rainbows, halos, auroral arches, and the aurora borealis itself—flare briefly in the day or night hemispheres. [16]
Birds
Along with the weather, all of the birds believed by C19 Natural Historians to have lived in or visited Amherst, MA in that century exist in the sky-vault above the horizon line, with resident birds appearing in the lower sky of the Firmament and migrants occupying the upper sky of the Firmament and, sometimes, breaching the free space above it. Three different icons represent, respectively, the classifications of “common,” “uncommon,” and “rare” bird species of the region assigned by C19 natural historians, while the icons’ five graduated sizes suggest the birds’ relative masses—from lightest (just 2.9 grams) to heaviest ( 11,800 grams). [17] The flickering of the icons partly reveals the patterns of the birds’ nineteenth-century migration cycles as observed by the natural historians of the time: An icon flickers “on” to indicate the arrival of a bird and “off” to mark the bird’s departure.
Poems
The birds share the sky with poems. While the cyclical migration patterns of the birds are simulated by their motions within and appearances and disappearances across the seasons, the condition of Dickinson’s bird-poems as series that can never again be added to is reflected in their setting as still, shining points perfectly visible in the Firmament at every hour and through every season of the year. In the sky above the horizon line, all of Dickinson’s “bird” poems, represented by the tiny “+”s (+ = Day World; + = Night World) she often used to mark pressure points of variance in her work, appear in the season of their composition or copying, or, in the case of “sent” poems, in the season of their circulation. While those poems that never left Dickinson’s private archive during her life shelter with resident birds above the horizon line but inside the upper arc of the sky-vault, those that circulated beyond that private archive share the realm occupied by the migrating birds, high in the firmament and sometimes beyond its upper arc. Poems that cannot be assigned to a season, but to a year only — or to no year at all —appear in the streaming dark below the horizon, with those retained by her within the bounds of the inverse shadow arc and those sent out of her archive falling outside it.
Together in the Firmament of the Archive-world, poems and birds compose new, uncharted constellations.
Data Soundings
Choirs and Soundways
The wheel’s circuit across the firmamental arc also stirs the sounds of nineteenth-century Amherst—or, rather, the descendants of those sounds captured by recording technologies from the twenty-first century—from the silence into which they have sunken in our collective unconscious, stirring too something akin to our memory / intuition of other worlds.
“In sound I am in depth,” writes phenomenologist Salome Voegelin. [18] In the Ring’s twelve tracks sounding the months of the year, each month sounds for a duration of two minutes, each season for six, and a year’s revolution sounds in just twenty-four, the number of hours in a solar day. Visitors may choose to listen to the year without interruptions; or, they may move the wheel back and forth along the firmamental arc to listen to any point in the year.
In our first attempt to access—and make accessible—the auditory imaginary, the deep and buried sonic networks of a possible past world heard by Dickinson, we created what we now call “data choirs.” To compose a data choir for a given month involved first sampling the calls and songs of every bird observed in that temporal zone by nineteenth-century natural historians of the region, then applying an algorithm based on those same natural historians’ classifications of a given bird as “common,” “uncommon,” or “rare/accidental” to determine the duration of each bird’s sounding and the interval between soundings. Like the earliest analog recordings made by nineteenth-century field researchers of the voices of isolated wild species, the birds of the data-choirs sound only in the anechoic chamber of their own inner worlds, sans all cultural references as well as all other environmental sounds. Yet also like the early analog recordings, the apparently “pure” sound of the choirs is the sound of the data of the world captured and distorted by the technologies—now digital—of our creation. Jarring, beautiful, alien, the sound of the data-choirs registers as at once something that exists forever in the mind of Nature and as no sound ever made on Earth.
[Data Choir: December] [Data Choir: January] [Data Choir: February] [Data Choir: March] [Data Choir: April] [Data Choir: May] [Data Choir: June] [Data Choir: July] [Data Choir: August] [Data Choir: September] [Data Choir: October] [Data Choir: November]
In our second foray into sounding the past we changed tactics. The final audio files accompanying the Data Firmament were produced not via the application of the algorithm of the Data Choirs but rather by our curation—our speculative commingling—of nineteenth-century accounts of bird sounds and weather found in the fragmentary records left by the region’s early naturalists with our own present, affective experience of these sounds in the lower atmosphere. Initially imagined as “scapes,” we later re-conceived the acoustic meditations we were composing as “ways” to evoke something of their mobile, wandering nature, their temporal plurality, and their ontological openness.
Both sets of sound files enjoin us to dwell in depth, in the life-of-things through the sound-of-things; both, moreover, seek to open in the sonic subject a lively wonderment about the world. Yet while the data-choirs accomplish this end by sounding our estrangement from “time” and “nature,” the sound-ways do so by proposing our intimate, if necessarily partial and transient enmeshedness in both. Here the sound-ways are accompanied by spare narratives—”Liner Notes”—documenting, at times harmonizing, the peregrinations of a human listener inside the seasons of weather and birds and poems. Since in the Firmament the relations between and among weather and birds and poems cannot be conceived and plotted in advance of our encounters with them, in place of a positivistic cartography of the listener’s passage across space and time, the liner notes offer a sense of their fluctuating attunements to a sound-world somewhere outside Dickinson’s west-facing writing windows.
Fathom measure. Measure fathom.
In the end, while the Firmament seeks to disseminate the bare data and sonic fragments of birds and weather and poems from 150 springs ago, it never offers a documentary sense of place. Instead, the momentarily re-wilded birds and poems and weather events of the Firmament are fleeting guides to a chaology of orders, coordinates of a moving, numinous, extensional world evacuated on “billows of circumference” before we ever fully get our bearings. If, in moments, the Firmament unfurls galaxies of birds and poems moving in the perfect meters and measures of a lost past world, so at others it fathoms the ecological distances and utterly changed meters between Dickinson’s world and our own. In the entropic space of the Firmament, we gain a sudden intuition of the long durée in which the the smallest, most vulnerable, and most ephemeral of things—poems and birds, thoughts and sounds—attain their infinity in the moment of their de-archivization and a heightened experience of the present moment in which our finger-falls onto a keyboard are part of the manifold and ephemeral data of the world we listen to and create.
For a Key to the Data Firmament and Liner Notes to the Sound-ways, see Firmament Notes. [Caroline: what are we calling the notebook?]
[1] The following eleven poems, identified by Jefferey Simons as connected with Dickinson’s lyric ornithology, are not included in dickisnonsbirds: Fr. 1 (juvenilia; outside the temporal boundaries of the archive); Fr 90 (the reference is to a domestic bird: Chanticleer, not a wild bird); Fr 198 (the reference is to a nest only); Fr 1019 (only an implied or ancillary reference to bird); Fr 1182 (only an implied or ancillary reference to bird); Fr 1352 (only an implied or ancillary reference to bird); Fr 1368 (only an implied or ancillary reference to bird); Fr 1408 (only an implied or ancillary reference to bird); Fr 1470 (only an implied or ancillary reference to bird); Fr 1577 (only an implied or ancillary reference to bird); Fr 1603 (only an implied or ancillary reference to bird). See Jefferey Simons, “Dickinson’s Lyric Ornithology,” Emily Dickinson Journal 28.1 (2019): 1-22. We hope that a later iteration of this work will include all of Dickinson’s writings alluding to birds.
[2] R. W. Franklin’s 1998 The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA & London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press) is the principal source for the dates assigned to Dickinson’s poems. Dates in the variorum—and in this gathering—are to manuscript witnesses rather than works, and mark the composition, copying, or circulation date of the particular manuscript. Manuscripts are generally dated to years and, when possible, to season, months, and (rarely), days. While it is possible to positively date a significant number of manuscripts, for many others the dates assigned are likely but not definitive; in these cases the date is marked as “c.”. In those cases where Franklin has assigned a date of “first half of the year” or “second half of the year,” we have dated it to the year only. In addition to Franklin’s variorum, we have drawn on Miller and Mitchell’s The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2024). Miller and Mitchell’s careful re-dating of manuscripts is reflected in Dickinson’s Birds.
[3] Seasons in the Poem Archive are defined as follows: spring=March, April, May; summer=June, July, August; fall=September, October, November; winter=December, January, February. Manuscripts dated by Franklin to the “second half” of a given year are marked as belonging to either “summer” or “fall”, depending on internal and external evidence, while manuscripts dated by Franklin to the first half of a given year are marked as belonging to either “winter” or “spring”, also depending on additional internal and external evidence.
[4] R. W. Franklin’s 1986 The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA & London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press) is the most comprehensive source of information on Dickinson’s paper types in the fascicles and the unbound bifolium sheets. Jay Leyda’s cataloging notes in the Amherst College Library are also a valuable source for information on paper. Jen Bervin’s recent research on Dickinson’s papers will add significantly to our knowledge of Dickinson’s material productions. One long-term goal of our project is to update information on Dickinson’s papers through additional archival research.
[5] The advent of new technologies of digital reproduction makes possible the representation of elements from both the manuscript and print traditions but does not necessarily collapse the distance between them. We gesture towards this nascent tradition in our use of just one hand-drawn element—the boundary lines found in Dickinson’s manuscripts—in our typographic transcriptions. Here, two stylized forms only of line are used.
[6] We are always seeing the manuscript not only through the veil of print but also under the horizons of the many scholarly editions of her work — Todd, Johnson, Franklin, Smith and Hart, Werner, Werner and Bervin, Miller, Miller and Mitchell, etc.—with their accreted editorial choices and conventions. In the print tradition, R. W. Franklin’s 1998 variorum—a culminating act of scholarship—currently exerts the most influence on editors and readers. This is not because the Franklin variorum perfectly discerns the physiognomy of Dickinson’s manuscripts and translates the signs and marks inscribed on them as Dickinson intended—how could we ever even know for sure what she intended?—in a new medium, but, rather, because he evolves a rigorously consistent internal system for representing these various marks and signs within the editorial (and print) horizons it defines. As a result. Franklin’s transcriptions have been naturalized in the reader’s mind—so much so that even the reader who turns their eyes upon the manuscript after years of reading in print sees the clear letter forms and punctuation of that edition in place of Dickinson’s more various ambiguous forms.
[7] Jefferey Simons (Department of English Philology, University of Huelva) gifted his research materials for his essay “Dickinson’s Lyric Ornithology” to this project. The exquisite notes on the avian behaviors described in Dickinson’s poems are his distinctive contribution to this archive. His essays on Dickinson have appeared in European Journal of American Studies (2017), The Emily Dickinson Journal (2019), and Amerikastudien / American Studies (2020). Other essays on the poetry and prose of James Joyce have appeared in Joyce Studies Annual (2002, 2013, 2018), European Journal of English Studies (2007), Genetic Joyce Studies (2010), and James Joyce Quarterly (2014).
[8] Clark’s list incorporates data from the 1880 lists made by another Amherst resident, W. A. Stearns, whose annotated list of the birds of Amherst was published in The Amherst Record: June 13, July 11, 18, 25, and August 8, 1883. Since Dickinson only ever used the common names for birds in her poems, many of whom exist in multiple species, a given bird’s identification in her work remains unsettled. In these cases, which include Blackbirds, Cuckoos, Eagles, Orioles, Owls, Plovers, Sparrows, Swans and Wrens, we have included as possibilities all species listed by H. L. Clark in The Birds of Amherst & Hampshire County (1887).
[9] Emmons’ 1833 record, published in that year in Edward Hitchcock’s “Report on the Geology, Minerology, Botany and Zoology of Massachusetts,” identifies 160 bird species in Massachusetts. The original MS was described as “written by Professor Emmons, in ink, in a small and cramped hand, and cover[ing] seven pages of foolscap” by Ruthven Deane (see The Auk 18.4 [1901]: 403-05.). Allen’s 1864 Catalogue of the Birds found at Springfield, Mass., with notes on their Migrations, Habits, etc.; together with a List of those Birds found in the State and not yet observed at Springfield, originally printed in the September issue of the Proceedings of the Essex Institute at Salem, Vol. IV, No. 2, greatly extends Emmons’ record, contributing notes on 296 species of birds he identified in the State. Given Springfield’s geographical proximity to Amherst, Allen’s notes on the 195 birds he observed in this location are especially salutary.
[10] The Cornell Lab’s BirdCast project, for example, currently scans the night skies via the Nexrad radar network, conjuring localized bird-migration forecasts via a fusion of machine learning, cloud computing, and big-data analytics.
[11] In the last fifty years, almost 30% of all North American birds have disappeared, with extensive losses in bird populations from every habitat (link).
[12] All bird sounds and sonographs come from the archive xeon-canto.org (www.xeno-canto.org), a website for sharing recordings of wildlife sounds from all across the world started in 2005 by Bob Planqué and Willem-Pier Vellinga and maintained by a small team of admins (Bob, WP, Sander Pieterse, Jonathon Jongsma and Rolf de By) with crucial assistance from Naturalis Biodiversity Center, especially Ruud Altenburg, and all of the xeno-canto community. Xeno-canto is run by the Xeno-canto foundation (or officially Stichting Xeno-canto voor natuurgeluiden), a charity (Dutch “ANBI”) from the Netherlands. Weather sounds and sounds from the anthrophony were collected from open sources online or recorded by us.
[13] The identification of ecological processes in Dickinson’s poems is an on-going project; it will take many readers to complete this preliminary catalogue.
[14] The Snell Meteorological Journal (1835-1902) contains 5 volumes, arranged chronologically and includes data on temperature, barometric pressure, wind direction and strength, clouds, sky, precipitation as well as remarks by the recorders. All five volumes of the Journal are housed in the Amherst College Archives & Special Collections.
[15] Currently, the drift patterns of the birds do not reflect the data from the Snell Weather Record on the directions and force of the winds, but only suggest the presence of winds in the skies over Amherst. A future iteration of this work will integrate the actual data into the drift patterns.
[16] Since fluctuations of atmospheric events in the Northern Hemisphere vary from year to year, the data from 1864—the year when the weather of Dickinson’s work alters forever—represents the constant inconstant conditions of the climate.
[17] The icons for birds in the Data Firmament appear in five sizes to suggest this range: 1) 2.9–9.7 grams; 2) 9.8–27.8 grams; 3) 28–178 grams; 4) 179-5974 grams; 5) 11,800 grams.
[18] Salome Voegelin. Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art. (London: Continuum, 2010), 133.