I spend many mornings holding binoculars to my eyes and watching birds come into feed.
I keep a daily list: juncos flitting like little groundling bats in the early dim light. goldfinches, male cardinals popping that red especially on gray mornings, nuthatches chitting continuously, purple finches, jays tucking their wings against their bodies and diving straight down from their perches in the dead maple like arrows blurring blue-white, one gray squirrel entwining itself around a wire feeder. The four resident crows swinging across the field and settling into the branches, one always on watch for the cooper or red shoulder hawks who hunt this turf. The red belly and downy woodpeckers, house sparrows, and then the starlings going everywhere en masse, gathering, waiting, then dropping onto the feeding table en masse, so many the table is obscured by their flaring wings.
I’ve been doing this for well over 40 years as well as collecting feathers, charting nests, watching the skies, listening for calls from brush and forest, recording incidents – an eagle beating along the French Creek 10 feet above the water, kettles of vultures too numerous to count in a gyre over our home, a dozen cardinals gathered in a knot, feeding in a blizzard.
I love all birds, but something else is going on here too, an urge to pay attention and to keep track of the days so they do not blur together more than usual. Maybe a desire to forget myself in them, to shut away that screechy little voice of consciousness that keeps saying “listen to my thinking listen listen listen listen.” Bloody exhausting that.
But they are so beautiful in their lives, so present, so immediate, innocent of any capacity for malignancy or mercenary motives, and thus a reminder of how the animals we encounter are another indicator of the world’s largesse.
