Professional Wild Birds
Spring is well and truly complete, here. Until I moved to the Shenandoah Valley, with its glorious, storybook springtime that unfolds over months, I never thought of spring as a distinct or particularly interesting season. (In the Southwest, spring seemed non-existent; in New England it was Mud Season and then Black Fly Season; black flies being small biting insects that swarm you as soon as it’s nice outdoors.)
Spring is also exciting for me now because I watch for the birds to return. I keep a nature journal where I log what’s happening on which dates. And it is so fun to record the dates as the birds return. I feel like I’m at a race, waiting to hand out suet instead of doughnuts, shouting and cheering as friends and family come pouring over the finish line.
The robins are back! The tree swallows! Yay!
One spring morning, I saw three tree swallows swooping and diving and tossing a white feather back and forth between them, like an aerial soccer game. As I learned later from a naturalist, they line their nests with feathers. I did not stay long enough to see who won it.
And next come the barn swallows, and the common grackles with their uncommonly beautiful peacock-blue heads and blazing yellow eyes. And next come the chimney swifts, with their constant chatter overhead; and my favorite, the grey catbirds, tumbling headfirst off branches and fence posts and catching themselves just above ground, like little trapeze artists. Catbirds can indeed sound like they’re meowing; but they are gifted mimics, related to mockingbirds, and they can also sing long and lovely songs, amusingly punctuated with meows, and also whistles and beeps like R2D2.
Upstairs, we have a tiny screened-in porch that we call the “catio,” because our (indoor only) cats and I can go there and watch the birds swoop by, right next to us.
It is especially fun at dusk. The last of the chimney swifts shoot past as they hurry to their roosts in — yep, chimneys — and then I start watching our two cats.
If they tense up and start looking wide-eyed in one direction, I turn my head to watch with them, and more often than not, a bat will hurtle close by the catio screens, and then we’ll see it over our (also tiny) back yard, flittering its arc against the twilight sky as it hunts for its breakfast.
On our front porch this year, we kept finding strands of long grasses. Somebody was building a nest.
The beginnings of a nest appeared on the ledge of one porch column, and then we had a very windy day. Grass clumps littered the porch, and the ledge was clean and bare.
A day later, we saw long grasses hanging from another ledge, so it was a robin’s nest. (The nest cups are tidy, but they do love to leave long strands hanging down.) The wind kicked up again, and that ledge too was blown bare.
A day or two later, I looked up and the full robin’s nest had been built on the same ledge.
“I’m afraid the wind is going to blow that down again,” I said to my husband.
“She does seem very determined to build there,” he said.
And then I remembered something I had read by one of my favorite birding writers, Pete Dunne, who was director of the New Jersey Audubon Society’s Cape May Bird Observatory, monitoring one of the greatest flyways on this planet for migratory birds.
Dunne was describing how people get anxious about the birds they see in their backyards; whether the birds have enough to eat, or too much to eat (should you feed them in winter?), or are building their nests in the wrong place, and so on.
Don’t worry, Dunne wrote somewhere in one of his books.
“These are professional wild birds.”
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Notes
I can’t remember which book he said that in, but I do love Pete Dunne’s bird books. If you are interested in watching birds, I highly recommend these two of his (many!) books, The Art of Bird Finding and The Art of Bird Identification.
They are short, funny, and their principles apply to bird watching anywhere in the world.
References
Dunne, P. (2011) The Art of Bird Finding. 1st ed. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books.
Dunne, P. (2012) The Art of Bird Identification. 1st ed. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books.