Phillip Hoose Singing the Delaware Bay Blues

The Delaware Bay Blues was written May 22, 2011 in a rented beach house in Reeds Beach, New Jersey. 25 or so biologists and volunteers, myself among them, had spent the entire afternoon trapping, measuring, banding and releasing hundreds of shorebirds. We were happily exhausted that evening. Wine appeared, and so did a guitar. We started talking about what it would actually feel like to be a rufa Red knot just pulling into Delaware Bay after, say, a four-day-and-night non-stop flight from Maranoa, on the North Coast of South America. You’d be burning muscle, exhausted, starved, bony, each wing stroke a labor. What would you be thinking? Someone asked. I had the guitar and yelled, “‘I need eggs!’  That’s what you’d be thinking! I need hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of eggs–and they’d better be here!”

And then the music just came, perhaps lubricated by the wine. The chorus got louder as the song filled out, and more people got into the chorus. We were all pounding the table on the chorus. It was a magical night, fueled by dedication to shorebirds and a determination not to let them die, and producing a song that almost seemed to write itself. –Phillip Hoose

LISTEN to the song, Delaware Bay Blues
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