Katja gave us a cast of characters for her Dawn Chorus on 9 April, my birthday. I’ll name some of them. Eurasian Blackbird Eurasian Blue Tit European Robin Eurasian Wren Eurasian Nuthatch The birdsong was beautiful, uplifting, transporting, at once worldly and otherworldly.  But the list of names was grounding – literally territorialising. These were European and Eurasian birds. I am from North America. Ontario. For me, a robin is the size of a European Blackbird; it would not fit in a teacup. A Blackbird has red epaulettes and is called a Red-winged Blackbird. A Jay is a Bluejay, with myriad tones of blue from cornflower to turquoise, kohl eyeliner and collar, and a sprightly crested cap. A goldfinch has a black cap and wing bands but is mostly high-vis yellow, with no dull red or brown. I love birds. But sometimes they leave me keenly aware I am an immigrant. * When I was about 14, I had an amazing geography teacher, Mrs Moore, from New Zealand. In week one, she set out a bunch of dusty rocks and talked us through them. It was boring and beyond opaque. I mean – rocks. For 14-year-olds. In week two, she set out the rocks again and instructed us to identify them. ‘Go.’  We didn’t have a clue. One rock was the same as another, wasn’t it? They were all… rocky – hard, heavy, dull, inert. As she had in week one, Mrs Moore again talked us through how to distinguish the rocks; to look at their colours, textures, shapes, and tonal variations to understand what processes had formed them, what materials they were made of, where they came from, and what their histories were. It was a kind of miracle – being able to read a rock, what had before seemed to me so profoundly illegible, blank, not even secretive but holding no secrets, with nothing to know. Mrs Moore taught me to read the apparently irrelevant, the apparently inscrutable, and the joy of doing so. This continued when she taught me how to read the landscape. We took a field trip just northeast of Toronto. The environment was boringly familiar: mostly flat, some squat hills, marked by farming, scrubby cedars and – in the winter’s shoulder months – dull puddles of grey snow. It seemed completely unremarkable and uninteresting – witnessed thousands of times out of car windows on long journeys. I think most of my classmates remained disinterested throughout the day. But for me, it was life changing. Mrs Moore called the landscape a kame moraine till plain. Just hear the poetry in that. A kame moraine till plain. She noted how the flatness was interrupted by lopsided hills – or moraines, or, sometimes, drumlins, in a drumlinized till plain. These little hills were smeared on the landscape by a sort of burping glacier as it retreated east many thousands of years ago. The landscape was telling us what had formed it, what it was like there so long ago. It showed how glaciers behaved like enormous cats refusing to move, and scratching out long lakes behind them. It showed how the glaciers had scrapped up rocky junk elsewhere and left it behind like glitches, little tokens of affection, little hills of shit, or time capsules. Or all the above. Mrs Moore gave me an amazing gift by helping me read the pre-history of the place I was from, and showing me I could read landscapes – their contours, materials, histories, pre-histories, and experiences. The landscape of southeastern Ontario I grew up in was blanketed in colonial placenames. I lived in North York. We had a little cottage near Uxbridge. My mother’s family was from outside Kingston, close to a town called Sydenham on a lake called Loughborough (spelled the same as what’s pronounced, in Britain, ‘Luff-boro’). As a young child, I didn’t know how colonial these names were, but I soon learned. Of course, there are also indigenous places names, or names derived from indigenous words or names: Toronto, Ottawa, Ontario. But these risk being crowded out by the cacophony of colonial placenames. Mrs Moore gave me a way of reading the landscape before humans and beyond humans. Mrs Moore also taught me how to read a map; how to unfold and fold it with preserving care, and how to interpret its codes and contours and, through them, envision the landscapes it represents – of vegetation, elevations, waters, amenities, resources, and borders. Where she had before revealed the mysteries in a seemingly familiar landscape, she now taught me the delicate codes on paper that could conjure whole lush, teeming, living worlds. * Katja’s dawn chorus cast list and Mrs Moore’s lessons in reading landscapes got me thinking we might make some new – old – maps, dictated and decreed by birdsong, their soundwaves drawing the contours, their wisdom predating all the peoples who lived in this place or that. The diminutive dull brown wren with the perky tail would no longer be known by its Latin name, Troglodytes troglodytes, or ‘cave dweller’, or by its short, gentle English name Wren, but as a vividly undulating and magically patterned terrain of peaks, valleys, vortexes, forests, and rivers. The grey heron’s dinosaur-age squawk might spell a landscape of sharp new mountains. The sparrow might conjure a scenery of foothills and forests. We might let the birds sing us new landscapes that can soothe, heal, inspire, and invent.