May
11, 2015
Greetings
from the flock,
“When birds burp, it must taste like bugs.” Calvin and Hobbes
This time of
year the windows are open, a blessing I will never take for granted. I can feel
the fresh air on my skin and the few sounds of the predawn. Usually, when my eyes open I know that the
rest of the world around me is asleep.
Except for the
birds. There are already a few industrious ones out in the trees, gossiping
about bird news. They say that the early
bird gets the worm. That’s fine. He can have mine, it’s still a worm.
I love the
sound of the birds because it is part of my favorite time of year. But to be honest I don’t think about birds
much, an indifference I am sure is mutual.
There are very few birds I can name, even fewer I can identify. I was raised in the city where crows and pigeons
seemed to be predominant. Robin is he
state bird. After that I begin to group
them as ‘small’ or ‘large’.
When I am
outside I am aware of nature around me, but birds have always been this sort of
fringe animal, a part of the background of the day. That has more to do with my frame of mind
than their real presence.
This morning I
walked out in the dim morning light and listened. The level of chatter had gone up
significantly since I drank my coffee.
It was raucous. It sounded as if
they were cheering. I closed my eyes for a few minutes and the sound blended
into a word. Joy.
There is a cardinal
that lands on the side mirror of my son’s truck, and admires himself
there. A woodpecker that has pocked the
side of our house, searching for breakfast in what seems unlikely places. Sparrows have caromed into the window of the
kitchen, then fluttered off, dazed.
One of my
favorite summer pictures, hanging on a wall upstairs, is from a foggy morning
at the beach, thousands of seagulls resting on the sand in the grey light. Which made me think of a morning last week
when I ran through a stubborn flock of pigeons in a park in Buenos Aires,
expecting them to explode into the air.
They did not give way.
A few weeks ago I came back from a run to find
two brown eagles soaring over my street, giving definition to the words grace
and power. An image that never fails to
astound me is the roiling cloud of starlings over the fields here. I have floated down a remote spot in a river
a few miles from my home, and watched a heron fly over, like some messenger
from prehistoric time.
Outside my
den, right now, there are two birds, sparrows maybe, hopping along the edge of
the birdbath, sipping and splashing each other.
A robin just dive bombed them and scattered them off to wherever
sparrows hang out to complain about robins.
I can name
more birds than my sleepy brain first allowed. Wrens. Chickadees,
bluebirds, pelicans, blackbirds, roadrunners, bluejays, condors, chickens. Penguins?
Ostriches, buzzards, hmm,.. those yellow ones. Ducks, swans, geese,
turkeys, doves, hawks, parrots, parakeets.
There’s probably more but now all I can think of is those yellow ones.
Like so many
things it is easy to relegate what seems common and ordinary to the back of our
awareness. I doubt I will ever become a
bird aficionado, but I do feel like I want to be more aware. There is beauty there.
Man has always
admired the birds ability to fly, which led us to all manner of poetry,
mythology, technology, and amazing exploration.
Of course
birds set examples which spawned a variety of adages: A bird in the hand
is worth two in the bush. Don’t count
your chickens before they hatch. One
swallow does not make a summer. What’s good for the goose is good for the
gander. Wise as an owl. Like water off a
duck’s back. Madder than a wet hen. The goose that laid the golden egg Naked as a jaybird. Run around like a chicken
with its head cut off. Strut like a
rooster.
I know we are
in different places on the food chain but there is a relationship between our species
and birds. I wonder sometimes if they
sing and preen and hop about just to communicate with each other, or if this is
how they let us know they are aware of us.
Ornithologists
believe there are between 10 and 20 billion birds in the U.S. Birds are not the background of the day. We are.
Hope
this finds you flocking together,
David
PS:
Canaries.
Copyright
© 2015 David Smith
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