My husband comes birdwatching with me. He is a brilliant bird spotter. He can spot a bird well before I would. He has, however, absolutely no idea what the bird is called. Even though we've been birdwatching for years. He will enthusiastically whisper, 'Over there, big white bird at the edge of the water.' Pushed to identify it, he says 'it's the fish-nicker' - which I think is a brilliant name for the Little Egret he's seen.
Watching birds is a joy for me. I am ok with identification for the most 'obvious' birds. It matters to me, up to a point. If I see something I haven't seen before, I'll look it up, but if I haven't taken a pic of it, my memory won't usually be good enough. And some birds even confuse the experts.
I write poetry about birds too - and when I write I need to use the right name. I have to accept though, that any potential reader may not know the bird I'm writing about. So, if they feel inclined, they have to look it up. And then they may think, 'ah yes, I can see that poem captures that bird' or 'I can see why she used that bird for that idea', maybe.
That's no different from references in poems to places, people, Greek gods or whatever. The reader will either know them or not, and will either look them up or not. And then they can decide whether that reference works for them. And, as always, it may or may not work for them, and/or may not mean the same as it did to the writer.
What if I write a poem about a Little Egret and call it the fish-nicker? I think that would bring a smile to a reader's face. Of course, it's not only egrets that nick fish. It would depend on what I wanted to say in that poem as to whether it would work or not.
Writing of a specific bird or using that bird as an image is different, of course, to speaking of 'birds' more generally, and different again if using the far broader term 'nature'. You're moving from the concrete to the abstract. Matthew Stewart, at roguestrands.blogspot.com identifies some of the difficulties of using abstract terms in poetry. I think in some ways there are equal difficulties in using a concrete image that readers may not know. The one can be too open, the other too closed.
So many other issues arise when using birds in poetry too - but I'll come back to them another time. In the meantime, my wonderful husband wants to go out and spot some 'buzzers', and you may or may not get that joke.
