Winter is on the way

Snow is in the forecast. Chickadees and titmice frantically load up at the feeder. Days get shorter. Birds that have spread out through spring and summer come together in flocks again. As the sun sets, there is the incessant flight of crows to their roost. Robins are massing. By day, geese strip the farm fields of summer's leftovers, then settle together in great rafts on nearby ponds. For comfort, security, and warmth? Or are they simply all attracted to the same sheltered places near dwindling food stocks? The mill pond at South Windsor is the avian Grand Central Station. All routes cross here.

Ceaseless honking. Sporadic squabbles. Strange outliers accepted. The solitary Snow Goose. The Barnacle Goose. The one Brant that doesn't know it's meant to be at the beach, not here in the middle of farmland. Four White-fronted Geese, whose orange feet not too long ago probably touched the earth of Greenland, which seems magical to me. The female Black Scoter bobbing limp at the water's edge, her life ending in this improbable place, never making it to the ocean for the winter. A Mallard hybrid who doesn't know his spiffy white bib sets him apart. The shabby-looking Common Merganser that I hope fattens up and makes it through the season.

It seems that every bird as the winter approaches knows that this is a good place to be. Rawk, there goes two Ravens overhead. Great Blue Heron. Red-tailed Hawk. And then there is the peculiar boy with the peculiar dog -- half black Lab, half Chow. The boy proudly proves the dog's Chow ancestry by prising open its willing mouth and showing off its purple tongue to me. "His name's Seamus," he says. "I'm trying to get him to catch one of these geese here, so I can eat it." He throws bread at the birds, which sail around him at a safe distance, watching with canny eyes. "Seamus is an alpha male. He'll attack and kill anything," the boy explains, as the purple-tongued dog snaffles the scattered bread, wags its tail, and lumbers over for a pat, oblivious of the waterfowl.

Dark dreams of birds in the half-light

I haven't been out with my binoculars very much lately, so the birds are coming to me in my dreams.They are trying to bring me a message, if only I could understand their language. My mind and my emotions have had an upheaval of late, and the way ahead seems murky. I could do with their guidance.  Last night, I was walking in the gloaming, the world around me only dimly visible. Two slender white birds with glossy black legs flew into a tree. Snowy Egrets, I said to the man walking beside me. No, they're Night-herons, he replied. I could still see them, incandescent white in the darkness, yet as soon as he doubted, I began to question what I was seeing. Their whiteness no longer looked so white, their forms became less distinguishable. We walked on, and in the twisted branches above me, suddenly a bird would appear -- but each time, when I looked closer, I would realize it was only the craggy bark playing tricks with my eyes in the half-light. An owl, that branch looks just like an owl, I said -- no, wait, a hawk. A Red-tailed Hawk, the man said, and at that, the bark became flesh and feather. And then the bird grew larger, its feathers darker. It began to call, but in a way no Red-tail has ever called before -- a loud, insistent alarm, a scream that seemed to carry with it all the angers of hell.

Red-tailed Hawk (Reports of Explorations and Surveys of the U. S. Pacific railroad, Volume X, 1859. Public domain.)

Why we like birds

Mom said that people are interested in birds only in as much as they exhibit human behavior—greed and stupidity and anger—and by doing so they free us from the unique sorrow of being human . . . I told Mom my own theory of why we like birds—of how birds are a miracle because they prove to us there is a finer, simpler state of being which we may strive to attain.
— Douglas Coupland, Life After God

The other day, I walked out my front door to go to the post office and heard a frenzy of crows caw-caw-cawing. Maybe there was a raptor somewhere, I thought. I looked up, and there were five crows mobbing a Red-tailed Hawk in a tree. The hawk, despite having claws for spearing prey and a beak for tearing it apart, flew away like a dart. The crows pursued it for a minute or so, until it was nowhere to be seen; then they returned, victorious, to their tree. 

The ruthless simplicity of nature—that's one of the things that draws me to watching birds. The decision was simple for the crows: Hawks kill our babies, we must attack. It was equally simple for the hawk: Too many beaks coming at me all at once, time to find another tree.

Our complex brains, with layers added one on top of the other like blankets on an evolutionary bed, make all kinds of exquisite options available to us that aren't available to birds. Crows are intelligent and playful; they can even devise their own tools. But they can't blog about their experience with that threatening hawk. They can't paint a picture of it or write a poem about it fleeing. They can't design and build an aircraft based on the way that hawk flew. 

And there are moments when I envy them for that, because it also means that they can't get tangled up in anxieties and neuroses and trivial things. Online shopping. The strange, lost-lonely feeling you get when you realize you really don't know whether you want 1 for billing or 2 for account inquiries. That someone else always seems to be more on top of things or happier or nicer to people than you are. Memories of long-ago embarrassment or shame or regret that feel as fresh as if they happened today. Standing in the grocery store and feeling overwhelmed by choice but never being able to find what you need or want . . .

Birds in the wild have concerns, too, but they can be reduced to one thing: the blood-pumping, oxygen-sucking urge to stay alive and nurture new life. (The next day, one of the five crows was using its beak to ferry wads of lovely soft mulch material from a garden bed up to the treetop to build a nest for the spring.) Watching birds reminds us that beneath all the layers, all creatures, including us, are driven by one thing: the simple urge for life. Birds turn the volume down on the noise inside our heads; they let us glimpse for a moment a reality that we spend most of our waking lives too busy to see. They remind us that it is time to live right now, this moment. Time to suck in that oxygen and feel your heart pumping!

American Crow image: J. J. Audubon, Birds of America (public domain)

Wordless Wednesday: Nantucket, New Year's 2011

Life on my doorstep

There is a park near my house that doesn't look like much at first glance. People walk their dogs through it. People throw trash out their car windows into it. I like it in the summertime when the guys next door play games out there after work; there's something very sane about that. If you look just a little more closely, though, it turns out that this park in suburbia is bursting with little miracles. I walked 15 yards from my door yesterday. There were no birds calling, the park seemed dead. But then a flash of yellow caught my eye. It was a quiet, glowing-daffodil-yellow Wilson's warbler. Within 20 minutes or so, I had also seen . . .

• a northern flicker
• a red-breasted woodpecker
• a hairy woodpecker
• a white-breasted nuthatch, such a cool weird little bird
• a blue-headed vireo
• a flock of juncos
• American robins
• golden-crowned kinglets
• red-winged blackbirds
• common grackles
• fish crows
• white-throated sparrows
• house sparrows
• a savannah sparrow
• black-capped chickadees
• tufted titmice
• scores of pigeons
• double-crested cormorants, including one wheeling through the water going for a fish, looking for all the world like a platypus as it did
• great egrets
• great blue herons
• great black-backed gulls
• herring gulls
• ring-billed gulls
• Canada geese
• mallard ducks, some of the males coming out of eclipse plumage, now gorgeous and iridescent again
• a mute swan, looking alternately evil and elegant, as they do
• and an osprey that I thought was injured and drowning but was merely struggling to get aloft because the fish it had just caught in its talons was almost bigger than its body.

I work alone in front of a computer all day, mostly in silence, and sometimes I find myself tumbling down a rabbit hole of solitude where minute facets of work assume gigantic proportions in my head. A comma. A colon. I inadvertently said something bad in that e-mail, didn't I? Maybe I better read over it again. For the fifth time. That's when I know I should step outside and forget myself for a few minutes, but usually I stay sitting at the desk for an hour more, and then another, as if I'm punishing myself. When I finally go out the front door, it's like lifting a heavy lead helmet from my head. There is sun! And air! I'm surprised all over again by the green out here, right on my doorstep. I had forgotten about life, but huh, it had continued on out here in full bustle. Why can't we remember what's good for us and just do it, every time?

Wilson's Warbler by Louis Agassiz Fuertes, National Geographic, 1917

Predator in the City

A while ago my dear friend Daniel and I took a trip up to Boston. Just as we arrived, New England decided to put on its one hot day for the entire season so far. It was sweltering, and somehow Boston with all its cobblestone and clapboard charm just seemed surreal. Late in the afternoon the first cool breaths of wind began pushing menacing storm clouds the city's way. We revived ourselves with cold white wine and had a stroll through the Boston Commons, which was now suddenly bursting with people out enjoying the promise of a cool change. It was the usual parade of people walking dogs, young couples canoodling, university students poring over books, kids eating ice-creams -- then I noticed a flash of feathers and the unmistakable swooping motion of what had to be a raptor. Right there in the middle of the city, a Red-tailed Hawk had snatched a pigeon out of midair, in one swipe of the talons.



The pigeon didn't even have a moment to register that it wasn't a pigeon anymore. We rushed over to the tree the hawk had landed on, and in a second we saw the pigeon's soft gray feathers start to drift down, as though someone had ripped open a down pillow.

And as we looked up at her devouring dinner, people began to look at us. They looked at us looking up, and then they looked up, until soon the hawk had an audience underneath that tree. An old African American guy, a couple pushing their baby in a pram, a young couple, and still more people gathered -- everyone transfixed and smiling, a little exhilarated by this reminder that even in the city we're living in nature, with all its fabulous gory drama.