The Backyard Bird Chronicles

If there is anything I have learned these past six years, it is this: Each bird is surprising and thrilling in its own way. But the most special is the bird that pauses when it is eating, looks and acknowleges I am there, then goes back to what it was doing.

The (Anna's Hummingbird) males are deadbeat dads that contribute nothing to making the nest, or to feeding either the female or the nestlings. They are off to find other females they can impress with their deep dives, chasing skills, and commandeering of feeders.

It is remarkable what birds can endure. It is tragic what they cannot.

I asked Bernd Heinrich if he knew why feeder birds, like finches, discard so many seeds. It turns out he and other scientiests did research on this back in the 1990s - of course, he did -measuring discarded seeds with painstaking accuracy. The short answer: Songbirds prefer shorter, fatter unshelled sunflower seeds, more depth than length, because they contain more oil. They take half a second to judge the seeds, dropping the low-density ones, until they find a seed to their liking.

During daylight hours, they (Anna's Hummingbirds) feed every 15 minutes, be it tiny insects or nectar from flowers or feeders. If they don't consume food often enough, they can die during the day. If they have not eaten enough before nightfall, they can die while asleep as they hang in suspended animation with tiny feet clutched to a thin branch.

With both fiction and birds, I think about existence, the span of life, from conception to birth to survival to death to remembrance by others. I reflect on mortality, the strangeness of it, the inevitability. I do that daily, and not with dread, but with awareness that life contains ephemeral moments, which can be saved in words and images, there for pondering, for reviving the bird and my heart.

I wonder if the crows were mourning their fallen member. Given so many had flown in from all directions to join the mourning (or lynch mob), the fake crow must have resembled a much-loved muckity-muck member of the tribe. Would they mourn a crow they didn’t know? Humans do. I have, for the victims of 9/11, for children shot in schools, for fictional characters no less real than a fake crow.

The sketches and words are a record of my life. They contain what puzzled me, thrilled me, what made me laugh and also grieve. They are like the scar on my knee when I was a child in nature.

I have heard experienced birders call the Lesser Goldfinch a 'trash bird' because it is so common and numerous. I heard others call a House Sparrow a 'junk' bird, an invasive, like the European Starling. I understand the antipathy. Invasive birds usurp habitat and resources. But I can't help but feel discomfort. The rhetoric is often the same as the racist ones I hear about Chinese people.

Feel the bird. Be the bird.

hummingbird came to inspect, a male with a flashing red

Or maybe the smaller bird was simply in a foul mood. Just because they’re birds

With every adult bird I see

I am still in a newbie stage, often wrong, often surprised, often puzzled. I know too little to know what's ordinary. But I have heard experienced birders call the Lesser Goldfinch a "trash bird" because it is so common and numerous. I heard others call a House Sparrow a "junk: bird, an invasive, like the European Starling. I understand the antipathy. Invasive birds usurp habitat and resources. But I can't help but feel discomfort. The rhetoric is often the same as the racist ones I hear about Chinese people. I am still new to birding, and so every bird is a good bird to see, even the ones I see all the time.

intentional curiosity,” what leads us to deep observation and wonderment. Questions that beget more questions are the fertile spores that can lead you deeper into the forest.

It fulfills a deep and instinctive urge to plug into the rhythms of what is happening around us. It makes us part of something larger and gives us a sense of our place on earth.

Such heartbreak comes with love and imagination.

Birds are creatures of habit in their habitat.

Muscles of the syrinx can push that flow very precisely and this vibration produces songs and calls ranging from raspy sounds to complex melodic sounds varying in length and variety.

birds have a syrinx deep in the chest. It consists of cartilage and two membranes that vibrate against each other with air flow.

an ornithologist told me that birds have to eat grit to aid in digestion.