A-well-a, everybody's heard about the bird

In his entry entitled “Bird and Birds and Birds,” Whitman writes about the numberless species of birds that he’s been seeing all April. “Such oceans, such successions of them,” he writes. He goes on to catalog them all—Black Birds, Woodpeckers, Quails, Turkey-Buzzards, Cuckoos, Owls, Cat-Birds. The list is extensive. It's really intriguing since we see so many catalogs in  “Song of Myself” and elsewhere in Leaves of Grass. It seems to have been something that he did quite naturally; a kind of pastime. He undoubtedly would have been able to refer back to such catalogs as well in the event that a poem needed a list.