World According to Birds

Last April, I was walking my familiar trail at the cabin, which goes through a grove of aspen that leads to the pond. In front of me on the ground was a female finch, probably a rosy finch and probably a young one, because it didn’t seem to have the natural fears of an older bird, allowing me to get as close as a foot away.

On one side of the path was a small snowbank, and the bird pecked at the snow. Was it enjoying the wetness or were there bits of food in there, undetectable to a human eye? From small puddles in the path, the kind that I would smash as I walked over them, the bird delicately took sips of water, and I could see the small gulps going down its throat.

How could something so small exist? Have a life most people are unaware of? From time to time it would pause, as if it were sensing things around it, and I imagined life on the ground, feeling every piece of dirt, every small watering hole, every breeze that ruffled its feathers.

In the past few months, as life has slowed to a crawl, my world narrowed to the natural world right in front of me. Rather than long hikes that end at spectacular waterfalls or vistas, I'm watching birds at the cabin and at my house feeder, and entering into their world as much as I can.

One morning at home, I was sitting in the backyard near the bird bath when I saw a house finch followed by young ones. After the parent left, the babies sat on the edge of the bird bath, contemplating, it seemed, this water and what should be done with it. One bird stuck its beak in and took a sip, seemed to like what it tasted, and then took a few more sips. Without warning, it jumped in, bobbing up and down in the water and fluffing out its feathers. I silently shared its joy at discovering water and all its indescribable  qualities.

At the cabin, I've been waiting all spring for the house wrens to arrive; their clear and melodic songs can pierce my heart. Just when I had given up and assumed they had found better lodgings elsewhere, they are suddenly everywhere. On the side of the garage, behind the cabin, a pair has been building a nest inside an old bird box (above).

From the back deck, I watched as one wren landed on the ground in front of me and poked around for the perfect-size twig, which seemed to be around 3-4 inches long, discarding others that were too long, too short or too thick. It then flew to the bird box and attempted to get this four-inch stick into a one-inch hole, having to maneuver the stick around in its beak before it was able to get it in the box. While it was doing that, its mate had found another stick and was waiting impatiently for the first one (males and females look alike) to add to the pile. Sometimes one got impatient and pushed the other one aside, much like a married couple: "Oh, let me do that, if you can't."

On the other side of the garage, the violet-green swallows have taken over the bird box (above), close enough to the house that, from my table, I can watch them swoop and sail at my eye level. They are amazing flyers, able to turn on a dime to catch a passing insect.

Meanwhile the hummingbirds dart from tree to bush and back, while a vulture soars just over the tops of the trees, close enough for me to see its giant wings. One day I saw three ducks fly overhead, an unusual sight here in the mountains where ponds are few and far between. This landscape of dense coniferous forests broken by a few open meadows and cabins would have meant nothing to them. I knew they were looking for one thing: the glint of water, something round and reflective—a safe pond to land on.

There are so many other worlds out there--complex almost beyond our imagining. Through an intervention from the human world, we've been allowed to glimpse one of them. It's taken a pandemic to get us to slow down and notice what's been there all along. For that, I'm grateful.

Comments

[Jennifer Woodhull]

Glorious! Thanks so much for this, Kathy. It's balm to this city-bound soul.

[Sally Hanson]

Beautiful ❣️ So nice to have the world come to a crawl, to allow us all to take advantage of the beauty all around us without having to go to the ends of the earth to see. I saw two woodpeckers walking to the park two blocks from my house in a very densely populated area in the SF Bay Area. Canadian geese and all their goslings in all stages of maturing, eating green grass like they were starving. In the creek near my house mother Duck and her 6 ducklings 🐥 Beautiful life is all around us! It takes a Pandemic to slow us all down enough to appreciate the “littlest” things now. The simple things we generally took for granted we now somehow find immense pleasure. The air is clean and fresh and now less traffic as people work from home. Much needed changes in so many ways we will not even be able to grasp it all yet. Maybe more loving 🥰 kindness to come in all our lives. Maybe we can become the humanity we need to be to create the Kind of world we need to survive.

[Julene Bair]

Your cabin sounds like a veritable birder's paradise. Thanks so much for this insightful look at your regular residents. I was unfamiliar with the violet-green swallow. Very striking -- what a beautiful bird.

[Carol Christenson]

Thanks for a great tour of the birds at the cabin and in Boulder! I have had a similar experience in that since the pandemic the singing and chirping of the various songbirds is so loud in the morning when Ruby and I walk outside it is astonishing. I wonder if it has always been like this? But the sound of traffic and so much more activity in the neighborhood was drowning it out?

[Kathy Kaiser]

Carol, I've wondered that myself. I think we're more aware now, because we've been house-bound and there's less noise from traffic, etc. We're not as busy, either, so maybe we're more attuned to the natural world.

[Kathy Kaiser]

Sally, I hope you're right, and that this is the start of a new awareness of the world and how good it can be.