In midsummer, the sun works its way around to the back of the house and a little before sunset floods the back porch with light and heat. This evening is no exception. Hot as it is, though, I know I’ll miss it when in a few weeks it slips out of sight around the northwest corner of the house for another 11 months.

It’s very quiet in the yard, with rain moving softly toward us from the Adirondacks. There’ll be some thunderstorms in it, which’ll have Kiki lying under my desk till the booms go away and the rain stops dripping from the eaves. Even the song sparrow that’s nested somewhere in the dooryard and filled the daylight hours with its sort-of music seems subdued.

I can never use the word, “dooryard,” without thinking of my mother. An incurable romantic and amateur poet, she nurtured lilacs and loved “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” the lament for the assassinated president. She didn’t make too much of it, as Whitman’s sexual proclivities were severely frowned upon in our family; but she shared it with me and kept a copy of it hidden among the pages of a book of poems by Kipling (approved by the guardians of family morals).

Earlier today I was sitting back and enjoying the song sparrow’s enthusiasm, when there was a contribution from a bird I didn’t recognize. I fired up my phone, activated the treasured Merlin app and asked it for an identification. Yellow warbler. Huh. Nice to have it around. And it got me thinking again about something that’s kept popping up in my head for decades now.

What if an alien species from a planet without flying creatures were to arrive on Earth some summer day and notice all the obviously animate objects flitting about, perching, calling and taking off again? Whatever would they make of them? These people, they’d likely be thinking, can just fly from place to place.

If they’d arrived about 65 million years earlier, they’d have seen the flying creatures’ ancestors, great reptiles that scaled down after the asteroid collision and started over. Those who doubt this narrative should take a look at a newly hatched great blue heron or sandhill crane chick. Ontogeny does indeed recapitulate phylogeny.

What would we make of our world if suddenly it were bereft of birds? The loss might be felt less in the metastasizing urbs and strip malls of much of modern America, but out here in the hinterlands it would be grievous. I’ve already felt it a bit as our insects have begun to disappear, because the phoebes that used to drive me nuts by nesting on the light fixtures in the garage, over the back door and even on the hinges of the casement windows, are gone. I spotted one flicking its tail on the ridge of the garage this spring, but that was it. My cars don’t seem to mind not being spotted with white poop, but I miss the phoebes and their little high-pitched calls.

My childhood home was in an Albany neighborhood of brownstones converted to “flats” about two blocks from the state capitol. There still were lots of horses then, delivering everything from bread and milk to ice. This meant there was lots of horse manure in the streets, which in turn meant there were lots of sparrows working it over for bits of oats. Pigeons, too, that roosted in the cornices of old buildings. I picked one up one day; it had a broken wing from a collision with a car. I kept it in a large cardboard box until it was healed and ready to go. That pigeon came back every few months, perched on my shoulder for a while, and left again.

We moved to Syracuse a few years later, on the edge of what seemed a vast green infinitude. The choruses of crows, shouting warnings from elm trees as we kids tiptoed across cow pastures on our hunts for big brown trout in limestone-saturated brooks, became an almost constant background. The brooks, the trout, and the elm trees are all gone now. But I’m sure the crows have adapted somehow.

There’ve been so many birds over the years: the barred owl in my swamp constantly asking, “Who cooks for you?” and getting Kiki growling; a pair of sandhill cranes whose eerie cries carried for miles across tundra on Victoria Island at 71º north; a flock of common terns, approaching at eye level like old torpedo bombers to protect their island rookery; wild turkeys foraging through my backyard. It’s difficult to imagine a world without them. The result, if I’m successful, is bleak beyond belief.