"Animals are not brethren and are not underlings.
They are separate nations, caught with us in the net of life and time." Henry
Beston, "The Outermost House:"
For 14 months, we have been constrained by the embargoes and
blockades of the enforced cancellation of social activities. In time, a bug becomes a feature, and it seems
that social distancing may just bring us all closer to reality. To wit: Without
the momentum break of the past year, I doubt that could have been able to spend
hours on my deck yesterday, the book of Willa Cather stories unopened beside me,
just hanging around with birds.
My home is a condo surrounded by Connecticut woodland and wetland,
wrapped on two sides with a thousand-square-foot deck. The woodland habitat
around me has been protected by the town’s cluster zoning and the understory of
ledge that stands firm as a stony barrier to human development. From my deck, I
see nothing but woodland. This woodland engulfs me.
Night here is animated by the calls of barred owls and
coyotes. Dawn brings glimpses of fox and bobcat. Small flocks of turkeys
transit the grounds while huge turkey vultures wheel overhead, riding the updrafts
of the bluff where I perch. Two small ponds on the 44-acre condo complex host
winter ducks such as hooded mergansers and ring-necked ducks and spring broods
of Canada goslings.
Even through our long stasis, the passage of time here is
inescapable. Winter juncos vanish at just about the same time as the owls start
calling for their mates. The titmice and chickadees and nuthatches that hog the
bird feeder through the icy months are displaced by an array of finches and
sparrows. And now that spring is
climaxing, the activity in the woodland is non-stop.
As I settled in on the deck with my book yesterday, a warm
breeze gently rattled the soft castanets of birch and oak in the canopy, that
low leafy murmur that so enthralled Andrei Tarkovsky for long
cinematic passages. The only sounds were the rustle of leaves and the birds.
The birds … From where I sat, there were probably 15 to 20
birds in my field of view at any given time, though half would be obscured in
the thickets and undergrowth. The first nestings of 2021 complete, many of the
birds were adults escorting and guiding their fledglings, birds the same size
as the parents, but still living on handouts.
I have just one feeder on my deck, my third feeder, the one
that finally has defeated the squirrels. The feeder hangs just a few feet from
a slider, and all day long, the constant avian activity out of the corner of my
eye is either a distraction or an attraction, depending on the moment. Each
year, the social structure and daily drill of the deck birds changes, as the
populations change.
This year, the day on the deck begins with raucous quartet
of immigrants: Three female and one male house finch. They mob the feeder,
darting back and forth to the nearby hanging Boston fern where they burrow into
the foliage after each other for reasons only they can explain. The four of
them come and go from the deck all day, always welcome for their cheery song
that brought them here in cages from China in the first place.
The dawn crew includes many goldfinches that seem to enjoy
showing off their brilliant colors by posing on the hanging flower brackets as
they wait their turn at the feeder, downy woodpeckers and big, graceful
red-bellied woodpeckers that wait their turns at the feeder from a set of well-used
tree branches, vividly marked chipping sparrows and a pair of mourning doves –
always a pair – that glean the spillage below the feeder, and the two
supervisors, the catbirds and blue jays that perch on the deck railings, watch
the activity and seldom approach the feeder themselves. Catbirds have long been
my favorite backyard birds wherever I have lived for their curiosity and
tolerance – even acceptance – of my presence.
Jays and catbirds being just plain nosey, come and go during
the day, but the deck’s constant presence is a lowly male English sparrow, who
spends his day moving from plant hanger to plant hanger bearing witness. From
time to time, he brings a piece of fluff to the bird box that is too exposed to
the midday sun for actual nesting. Instead, he will perch of the roof for
hours, calling for a consort to join him. Despite a few weeks of frenetic mating,
the male sparrow’s the bird box remains a house, not a home. But he persists.
As the day progresses, I catch sight of the male phoebe,
half of the pair nesting atop the bird box I set under the deck. A shy
flycatcher, he keeps his eye on me from the oak trees as I stand above his nest.
This year, for the first time in my life, a bluebird comes to my feeder several
times a week. I still fall all over myself whenever I catch sight of bluebird –
the thrill never wears off.
Late in the day, a ruby-throated hummingbird makes a pass
along my deck rail, where I put out hanging annuals for both of our benefits.
My neighbors all have hummingbird feeders outside their windows, and for a week
the hummingbird ignored the real plants and came to my window repeatedly,
hovering there and – inadvertently or not – tapping on the glass with its beak.
The other late day visitor is a young male cardinal, oddly shy around the
sparrows and finches despite his bulk, a visitor both polite and brilliant.
Gone are the Carolina wrens and the house wrens. Both
started nesting a months ago and gave up when landscaping and deck work annoyed
them after the nests were almost complete. Humans live here too, at least for
now.
Yesterday, I intended to read in the soft breeze on the
deck, but there was simply too much activity for me to concentrate. Two pairs
of woodpeckers were feeding young in the trees. At times one would swoop in to
pluck a sunflower kernel from the feeder to take to Junior, at times Junior
would trail the parent along a tree branch as mom or dad dug some buggy snack
to feed it.
The woodland was full of bird murmuring, not the
full-throated Here I Am song of spring dawn and dusks, but a low contented chatter
that mingled with the rustling breeze.
As I write this, I glance up. Through the window above my
monitor, I watch the finches queue up and swoop in to the feeder. Through the
day, it never stops. Isolation and stasis are in the eyes of the beholder.
