Mass incorporates a small choir, plus a very special soloist I'd learned about while attending a meeting in this beautiful city. One morning, I quietly joined a handful of local residents in the pews, dwarfed by towering arches and hushed by the priest's solemn chants of biblical Spanish. High overhead, above the apse and stained glass window, creeping about figurines, niches, and spandrels of a huge concrete dome, emerged the focus of my visit. It was a Canyon Wren, occasionally traversing with quick flights and frequently disappearing into deep fissures in the ancient concrete. Then the choir began its first hymn, and the wren as if on cue launched one of the most ringing and haunting displays of vocal beauty I've ever heard.
Few birds deliver such a heavenly cascade of sound under any circumstances.
Only the finest canyons in the American West could reverberate these beautiful whistles more perfectly than an early colonial Spanish cathedral. This wren had found a man-made amplifier for its territorial whistles. A Yellow-bellied Sapsucker was drumming its territorial display somewhere nearby, but the sound was unusually metallic. This sapsucker had flown almost a quarter of a mile from its wooded territory to take advantage of a man-made object with desirable acoustic qualities. Messages of land ownership, advertisements for mates, and warnings to family members reverberate all about us at this season in the Northern Hemisphere.