Feed the Birds

Early one recent evening I sat in my living room for about 20 minutes looking out at the birds visiting my backyard birdfeeders. I don't usually give myself this luxury. I don't know why not--there are not many activities that can compete with the benefits of this combination of bird-watching, meditation, contemplation, rest, and refreshment. My beautiful, tri-part, soaring east window gives onto a layered suburban woodland landscape for which I can take no credit. All the patient work in the service of a vision of backyard tranquillity must be credited to the house's previous owners.

The landscape's senior birdfeeder, which I inherited with the house, is a sturdy box with two plexiglass walls, two faux log cabin walls and a hinged peaked faded green wooden roof that opens to receive fresh dispensations of birdseed. It has always had plenty of traffic. The two birdfeeders which I purchased and installed in June (a copper-trimmed two-story model and a modern-looking rectangle with a flat roof, flanked by wire holders for suet cakes) sat for weeks without doing any business. Every time I would glance outside, the level of seed in the new birdfeeders stood as high as it had been the day before. My limited knowledge of birds and birdfeeding did not extend to an explanation of the birds' lack of interest in the new birdfeeders, other than to hypothesize that the sunflower seeds in the mix were too big to get through the holes that supplied the feeding ledges. I added some thistle seed, but it could not filter down past the larger seed. A few days back, I had determined to redistribute the seed and place nothing but thistle seed in the new feeders.

Then on this evening, the heavens opened and delivered an unending stream of birds to all three birdfeeders. The ones I can identify don't go far beyond the male and female cardinal. I suppose there were various finches, because they were small. Wrens? Nuthatches? There were yellow-and-black ones and one with a russet thatch; one with a rusty breast (too small to be a robin) and a few small brownish ones with black trim neatly piped along the edges of each wing. I realized as I sat watching that my next purchase must be a bird identification manual.

The daytime birds, including the cacophonous crows, the bluejay who is always alone, and the surprisingly aggressive doves (those in my yard, at least, not at all peaceful in their birdly relations), were elsewhere. Even the mother and child bunnies that often hop by were not to be seen. A brown squirrel and a black squirrel, thwarted by squirrel baffles from reaching the feeders, nibbled on the seed that fell to the ground.

The little birds' wings whirred so rapidly as they spun through the landscape that to my vision the wings blurred. I didn't know that the wings of birds other than hummingbirds did that. Growing up in South Texas, land of road runners that skitter among the chapparral, sparrow hawks, pelicans at the beach, and bob-whites with their distinctive call, as a child I did not know many songbirds. I knew not at all in life, but only in death, the delicate doves and quail that my father shot during bird season, and that we would eat freshly dressed, cleaned, and roasted, with nothing but toast, after getting home from whatever ranch he had hunted on, at 9 or 10 pm on a hot Texas night. Those birds lived in the cover of gray-green mesquite trees on the dry ranches that stretched southward toward Mexico. As a girl, I did not sit and look out at my backyard anyway; and if I had, I would not have seen many birds among the rosebushes my mother so laboriously coaxed from the baked ground.

Today, I cannot wait to buy more birdseed to keep the songbirds coming. Their grace and beauty alone would be enough to compensate me for the cost of birdseed (not the least of which cost is the labor involved in lugging the big economy size home). But it is their naturalness that endlessly fascinates. Is it anthropomorphizing to describe them as spontaneous? I think perhaps it is, so I will stick with natural. Nature is natural -- big whoop. But I love it. The rhythm of the birds' movements, the quicksilver turns, the assessment of danger on the wing, the un-self-consciousness of it all -- is like standing under a waterfall of purity. The birds are made light by their apparent freedom from every calculation except the calculation that finding food means staying alive.

I'm not a birdwatcher; but I love to watch the birds.