Battlefield Birds

Visitor Center, Antietam National Battlefield

I watched a kettle of 16 or so Turkey Vultures as it caught a thermal and climbed in the air. They passed the face of a quarter moon and rose higher. The cast bronze of the artillery piece I leaned against felt colder than the comfortable 40 degree air temperature. The sun had been up for about a half hour as I waited for the visitor center at Antietam National Battlefield to open. I wondered if the vulture’s genetic memory told him this was a good place to find a meal. Or, could the stench of blood left in the soil by 23,000 human dead still trigger hunger spasms in the birds? Antietam, or Sharpsburg, would be recalled as the deadliest day in a war that saw too many deadly days.
I stood on Sunken Road, later called Bloody Lane. It’s just a depression in the earth made by farm wagons where soldiers tried to hide. This firefight, which lasted three hours, killed 5,500 men. Eastern Bluebirds were shagging bugs from the wooden picket fence, built to replicate what was there in 1862. Were bluebirds there that morning when the first shots rang out just before dawn? Did they hang around as the cacophony of the muskets and cannon deafened men? Did the Confederate soldiers see the bluebirds through the blinding flash of the Union army muskets? Johnny Reb would have been facing same direction where I stood at approximately the same time of day and time of year, trying to imagine the horror in this now-bucolic scene.
I was in the area after dropping my hiking buddy off at Harpers Ferry. Since I was unable to do the hike, I thought I’d check out the historic sights. I couldn’t do the hike, but I wanted to get a feel for what I’d be missing, I suppose.
In the stillness that was this morning, a Northern Mockingbird sang his complicated song from atop a fir tree. Had mockingbirds graced the few trees shown in the photos of the battle’s aftermath? Only death and devastation can be seen. Men’s bodies strewn about. Limbs missing. Holes where there should be heads.
A pair of Horned larks flittered in circles nearby, then landed to glean what they could from the grass. European Starlings chattered in the trees alongside Bloody Lane. They had not been here in 1862 since they were not introduced in America until 1890. The cheerful and incessant song of a Carolina Wren drew my attention away from the depressing sight.
And what have we learned since that uncivil Civil War? Not much. I can’t imagine anyone touring the battlefields of Vietnam where 50,000 Americans and countless Vietnamese lost their lives. Nor will they tour the bloodstained battlegrounds of Korea, Iraq or Afghanistan. Maybe the birds will.
The genetic memory bank of the vultures, or maybe the warming thermal, drew the kettle east, toward Gettysburg.


Bloddy Lane, Antietam National Battlefield