Sorrow In The Yard

How is my feeding of the birds going, you might ask? Well, I suppose it is going well, although there are now 18 of my least-favorite birds, the squabbling portly doves, who should probably sign up for weight watchers, pronto.  As should some squirrels, who are otherwise going to be too slow to escape from Dorothy if they keep hoovering up all the seed.  They can’t say I didn’t warn them.  Bulldogge is faster than she looks.

But anyway, I keep putting seed out and we keep getting winged visitors, probably at least twenty or more different kinds daily, which is nice.  And we have a hairy or downy (I can’t tell those apart) woodpecker couple who visit our suet feeder in the front.

We did have sorrow in the yard on Thursday morning when the biggest hawk I’ve ever seen appeared high up in the branches of our highest tree.  This hawk was seriously big—at least 26 inches tall, if not taller.  She was sitting up there minding her own business, and I thought it was odd, although not unheard of, that the squirrels and birds at the feeder did not disperse and instead just kept feeding despite the hawk sitting above them.  The reason for this nonchalance became clear when our neighbors informed us as we were going to work that there was a dead hawk in their backyard.  So our poor large girl had clearly somehow just lost her mate!

And so even though Walt Whitman is a poet I haven’t read or thought much about since high school, I feel the urge to quote him again.  Surely our hawk must have been singing such a song high up in our tree?

"...Low-hanging moon!

What is that dusky spot in your brown yellow?

O it is the shape, the shape of my mate!

O moon, do not keep her from me any longer.

...But soft! Sink low;

Soft! Let me just murmur;

And do you wait a moment, you husky-noised sea;

For somewhere I believe I heard my mate responding to me,

So faint—I must be still, be still to listen;

But not altogether still, for then she might not come immediately to me.

...O darkness! O in vain!

O I am very sick and sorrowful.

...O past! O life! O songs of joy!

In the air—in the woods—over fields;

Loved! loved! loved! loved! loved!

But my love no more, no more with me!

We two together no more."

Our backyard birdfeeder in happier times.

"Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"

We have a really good variety of songbirds in our neighborhood and yard, and although I have been enjoying seeing and hearing them, until recently I had not put out seed for them to eat.  Mainly because with a baby, a full-time job, a dog, and two cats, I just didn’t have the time for another extraneous chore of the caretaking variety.  But I also held off because I can get a bit obsessed with the birds if I feel like they are relying on me for food.  I get all, THE BIRDS! HOW WILL THEY FIND ANYTHING TO EAT?!  And although I warned Sean about this, that once I start feeding them I will get all OCD about it, he still encouraged me to buy seed and put up a feeder for the feathered rascals. 

So I did at the end of December, and at first all was well:  the titmice and chickadees found the feeder first, and then other birds caught on, and our yard was all a-flutter and it was interesting to watch.  But then came the polar vortex, and its 3 degrees convinced me that without more seed our neighborhood song birds would freeze and fall from the sky.  So I decided that I needed to supplement the seed in the feeder with some extra safflower and sunflower seeds sprinkled on the table.  And the birds loved this!

But now I am often in a state of worry about what seeds are available, where, and when.  And if a bird should stop by the picnic table and NOT find seed there, it is all I can do to keep myself from running out with a cup of seed and refreshing the sprinkling.

I’m trying to contain my crazy but am not always succeeding.  I’ll leave you with an interesting bird event:  one very cold Saturday a robin came to a tree in our backyard that was covered with red berries and that my parents the gardeners think is a kind of decorative crabapple.  Anyway, this tree has been covered with berries since the fall, and all of a sudden on this one Saturday at the end of December, a robin landed and ate a berry and then summoned its flock to the tree.  Soon there were twenty to thirty robins in the tree, all puffed up and plump, and gorging themselves on berries.  They came at 9 and left at around 2 and when they did so, nary a berry remained on the tree.  Here’s a blurry picture or two of the event: