Things I am grateful for today

• Autumn air, which smells of sunshine and dry leaves and dreams deliciously dissolving into memory.
• Seed pods scattered all over the sidewalk, which crunch under your every footstep and crackle in a way that makes you feel like a child again.
• A fish crow making the weirdest mewling sound, so that I looked under a hedge for the kitten that must be there, then around the corner for the mother that must surely be pushing a baby on their afternoon walk, and then finally at the roof line above, and the crow looking down at me, making this soft, plaintive sound.
• Three young yellow-crowned night-herons that swooped into a part of the harbor I have never seen them in before, silent and gray like stealth warplanes.
• Funky Duck, the mind-bending hybrid of mallard and who knows what else, still bobbing around with the mallards as you did all summer, somehow fitting in with them though you are double the size and have those crazy white spectacles.
• An osprey standing in the shallows bathing and drinking as though it were on holiday from the swooping diving flapping fish-snatching hawk life, staying there so long that I began to rehearse in my head the phone call to a wildlife rescue service about this injured, defenseless osprey stuck in Milford harbor.
• The man at the dock who didn't make me feel like a fool when, thinking I was all alone, I laughed out loud as the osprey shook like a dog and took off, then shimmied mid-air, realizing the job of shaking off those droplets wasn't as complete as it had thought -- clumsy and awesome all at once.

Things I am grateful for today

The Catbird that I see patrolling the same section of fence every afternoon. It is his fence, and don't you forget it.

That while I was not seeing a White-winged Dove I'd set out to see earlier this week, this Song Sparrow landed beside me instead.

The sanity of trees at moments when all else in the world seems crazy.

And that only two days after I called the Milford Police to tell them that my neighborhood park had racist and sexist graffiti in it, I returned to find this:

Things I am grateful for today

Time alone to think.

Pine Warbler, Addison Bog, Conn.

Time to share and commune.

Pine Warblers, Addison Bog, Conn.

Life that unfurls itself as soon as the ground thaws.

Addison Bog, Conn.

Moss that looks like tiny pine trees.

Club Moss, Addison Bog, Conn.

That I know where to find the Bluebird of Happiness, 

even if she does half turn her back on me sometimes.

Eastern Bluebird, Weir Farm, Wilton, Conn.

Old stone walls.

Weir Farm, Wilton, Conn.

Blossoms and blue skies.

Weir Farm, Wilton, Conn.

That Baltimore Orioles always make me think of orange sorbet.

Baltimore Oriole, Woodcock Nature Center, Wilton, Conn.

Woodcock Nature Center, Wilton, Conn.

And that even though they have been back in town only a couple of weeks,

their nests are already works of art.

Female Baltimore Oriole with nesting material, Grace K. Salmon Park, Westport, Conn.

Her nest.

Things I am grateful for today

• The sound Mute Swans' wings make as they fly overhead, like a piece of rusty old farm machinery shooting through the air.
• The Song Sparrow who was singing on my morning walk. I didn't even realize I'd missed your call all winter long until I heard it again today. I'm glad you no longer have to huddle down in the grass, hiding from the bitter wind.
• The rat-tat-tat of the Belted Kingfisher flying up and down the harbor. You're such a mystery to me -- darting by so fast, appearing and then disappearing, like the Phantom. You nest somewhere within the earth on the banks of the harbor each spring, but you do an amazing job of keeping the location a secret.
• The wail of a gull that I mistook for a baby for a second.
• The Northern Cardinals who are going off like alarm clocks all over the neighborhood. Spring! Spring! Spring!
• The Buffleheads who spent most of the winter in Milford harbor, the first time I've seen that happen. You guys have no idea how cute you are, diving down then popping up like rubber duckies in a bath tub. Stay. Have babies.

Things I am grateful for today

• The common but beautiful birds you see when you're meant to be looking at a rare bird that's been blown off course from the other side of the country, or Scotland, or Greenland, or heaven knows where.
• The Northern Harrier standing on a post out in the field with the rare geese, the afternoon light hitting it in a way that makes you truly see the bird in a way you never have before.
• The four billionth Tufted Titmouse that's zipped past while you're hoping to spot the Mountain Bluebird and that you give in and finally take a look at--that big liquid eye looking right back at you as it cocks it head.
• The Chickadee sitting on a branch above the Calliope Hummingbird that should be basking in Mexico but is inexplicably in snowy shoreline Connecticut. Next to the tiny hummer the Chickadee looks like some gigantic mutant from a 1950s sci-fi movie, "Attack of the 30-foot Chickadee!"
• The people who spot these rare visitors and put the word out so everyone can take a look.
• And the International Bird Rescue Research Center and WildRescue. A disturbed person has captured gulls in San Francisco and put tight collars made of cut-up beer cans around their necks. The IBRRC and WildRescue are doing their best to recapture them, cut the collars from their necks, and release them. It would be easy to dwell on the dark things going through the mind of the person who has been cruel to these birds. But watching the rescuers handle a gull so gently while they remove the collar and check it over is enough to make your heart melt.

Things I am grateful for today

The drab little brown female House Sparrow I just saw having a dust bath that could only be described as gleeful. / That there was a local family so generous that a hundred years ago they donated a tract of land near my apartment as a bird refuge. / The fact that robins sound like flutes, and are everywhere. / That there are people who care about baby birds that have fallen out of trees. / Northern Cardinals providing a vivid flash of red in the garden when you least expect it. / That Chickadees and Titmice always seem to go together as a package deal. / And that I just had to stop at an intersection in the middle of downtown to let geese cross the road.

(Drawing of female House Sparrow by Wilhelm von Wright, 1810 - 1887)