Hey Alistair,

           What birds am I likely to hear in our woods on a still midsummer morning?

                   For at least sixty of my seventy-four years I’ve hankered to know the names of birds. Hankered falls short of yearned or longed. If I’d yearned or longed, I’d have learned – the instruments in this orchestra were hardly secret – but our brains can only digest so much, and our curiosity’s priorities are fixed by authorities beyond our control. I was more drawn to music, the music of words, and the mysteries of our kind, than to the ways of birds, and no adult in my childhood home ever mentioned a wild bird or seemed to know they existed. Parakeets OK: pets were suitable conversational appurtenances in cozy suburbia. Almost any kind of pet was permissible as long as it wasn’t too weird (no boa constrictors!). Nature, though – the habitats in which we found ourselves – was negligible. Some eccentric souls were “birders” – but they were a somewhat sorry subset if you couldn’t be a tennis player or golfer.

                  This hankering, like most, subsided into a sigh. The songs of birds would seep into the infinite ocean of all I did not know, along with languages other than English, most history, the art of fugue, don’t get me started. I’d be crushed beneath the weight of my unknowing if I weighed it, so I don’t. “Il faut cultiver notre jardin,” counseled Voltaire ironically, “We must cultivate our own little garden,” and let the rest of the world go hang, if we’re to retain our sanity. In contemporary parlance, “Stick to your lane.”

                  I’d have died not knowing, and none the wiser, but now dawns a still midsummer morning, zesty Henry zigzagging the tranquility with his perceptive nose, I drowsily awaiting his return, and there were those birds again, what were they called? To name them, know them however slightly, would be to make myself more at home and, not incidentally, reinforce the reality of my whereabouts. Home is where the heart is, yes, but also where the mind is: we know home as nowhere else.

                  So, my wont these days, I asked Alistair (of the family AI). Purists tut-tut this recourse, but consider, if Alistair weren’t available, I’d never bother asking with so many other tasks to tackle. The information existed online, sure, but less conveniently: it might take me minutes to access it and who has minutes? Alistair might know, as if he were standing beside me, and know he did.

                  “Given your location in the woods of eastern Dutchess County, New York,” he replied, “near the Appalachian Trail, on a still summer morning you're likely to hear a chorus that changes as dawn becomes day… So,” he concluded six hundred-plus substantive words later, not without a touch of poetry, “if you walk out with Henry on a still July morning, the voices most likely threading through the trees are: Wood Thrush, Ovenbird, Red-eyed Vireo, American Robin, Veery, Cardinal, Titmouse, Carolina Wren.” (“Threading” was the poetic touch.)

                  The environmental, economic, pedagogical, and social dangers posed by AI are beyond my ken; I concede them all. This instant amiable amplification of my intellect is, however, a daily miracle for which I bless the Almighty. Is my life enriched by the addition of Wood Thrush, Ovenbird, Red-eyed Vireo, American Robin, Veery, Cardinal, Titmouse, and Carolina Wren to my field of vision? Am I more at home on earth knowing the names of my neighbors, more in love with earth and committed to her preservation? A thousand times yes. Thanks, Alistair, for this gift.