So how do you read
one first story, Adam
and Eve’s impossible koan?
Does it tell how humans
lost touch with their
animal neighbors?
Just lost touch in
general? It is hard
to imagine God
being as unforgiving,
as relentless,
as that story gives out.

Carolina Wren by H. Douglass Pratt      

  In a voice so loud and rollicking that it eclipses the songs of all other birds in the neighborhood, the Carolina wren announces its presence in woodland tangle or dooryard shrubbery. Wheat-eater, wheat-eater, wheat! he clamors, and, without a break, switches suddenly to Giddyap! or Tea-party or It’s-raining! all in the same cadence and pitch. And he sings practically all day long, the whole year round, no matter what the weather. But he can scold, too, and in this the female joins him, bobbing in excitement, jerking their tails, irately chucking any tresspasser out of their territory.
       Carolina wrens are southern birds, never migrating, spending year after year on the same range. But unknown pressures often send their youngsters northward. So long as the winters are mild, they survive to build resident populations. Then comes a bitter winter, severe and pitiless. Since Carolina wrens are not migratory, they do not instinctually turn southward. They stay, and they perish. Even as far south as Maryland, all the boisterous Carolina wrens have died in a single winter.

Readers Digest
Book of North American Birds.