When I was a child my father used to be stumped for answers to my questions. I asked him one day about birds and he said that they were from the back of beyond where the crows fly backwards to keep the dust from getting in their eyes.
I woke up this morning thinking about birds. I am not a birdwatcher by any stretch of the imagination, and the only flying I like to do is in a metal cylinder held together by millions of rivets flying in close formation at 35,000 feet to get me to Nebraska to see my grandchildren. I do not track through the woods decorated with a pair of expensive binoculars looking for the rare “speckeled tailed , pink lipped snickerwhopper that is reported to be on one of its rare appearances in the nearby woods.”
There seems to be more and more flocks of birds in the sky these days. They fly around seemingly aimlessly and then they dive-bomb into a tree and just chatter away. I began to wonder what it would be like to be a bird in this flock.
Here I am, a sleek feather coated body streaking through the sky with my friends, family and even some groupies who just tag along. Today I am on the outside of the group and I don’t particularly like that because of the eagles. Sometimes they swoop out of nowhere and grab one of us to feed their young but on the other hand being on the outside gives me freedom to flap my wings at will and do fancy flying that cannot be done on the inside of the group. When you are on the inside of the group you have to fly in formation – like wingtip to wingtip and you cannot touch or you will cause someone to falter and then the whole flock is out of kilter. I have never figured out who makes the decision to swoop into a tree – we just all go at the same time and there we sit and chatter to each other until someone decides that we should leave and then we scatter to the sky and swing and swoop until the next roost presents itself. We don’t have much staying power so we go from treetop to treetop and rest in between flocking exercises.
When we are in the trees we chatter together. Like I was saying to Madge here, her feathers are always so well preened. This year she is sporting the newer colors that show that she is older than I am. I am envious of her plumage and told her so. She then confided in me that her talons are dry this year and she is afraid that she might chip a talon the next tree we land in. I did not think about that. My talons are pretty sharp this year and I can get a good grip on the tree. It is easier to land in the trees now that it is fall because there are not so many leaves to get me tangled up. I am always fearful that I will not get such a good roost and I will falter and perhaps fall to a lower branch. Frankie told me that I am doing better in this area but I am not so sure. Joey fell out of the tree last week because he forgot to grab on with his talons. He was actually showing off to Missy because he likes her and wants to fly next to her every time we flock. Ah, these young ‘uns – will they ever learn.
We have to avoid the trees on the next street because there is a cat that lives there and likes to hide in the branches. One day he will be there and we will not see him and then he will have lunch. He has such patience. Another flock, new to the neighborhood landed there last week and I heard that the cat got about three of them in one blow. Either he is getting swifter at his hunting or this was a particularly slow flock. When it is time to leave the tree, someone gives the signal and we flutter out and then gather speed and we rule the sky.
And then there is the predicament of the tree that gets flocked by the birds.
Oh no, it’s that mob again. They just show up and they get in my branches and they chatter and make a racket and I am supposed to be getting ready to sleep for the winter. How can one sleep with that crowd sharpening their beaks on my branches, grabbing on with their sharp talons – it’s surely an ouchy experience when they dive-bomb my branches. And then there’s the problem with the feathers; They preen and sometimes they pluck the ‘out of place’ feathers and they litter the ground around my roots. Well, that’s transients for you, coming in and littering and then leaving on a whim. If they had any concern for me at all, they would do something about helping keep my branches warm by roosting for a few hours instead of the “Hi” and “Bye” kind of activity they exhibit.
Then there is the little child observing the flocks of birds and really wondering about them. Like, do they scratch the clouds when they fly high? Do their mommies and daddies allow them so much freedom that they come and go as they please? Where do they go at night, do they have nests somewhere that they sleep in? When they fly during the snowstorm, do the snowflakes get in their eyes? How do they stay dry when it rains? How do they know when it is time to fly somewhere and do they always have a spot in mind when they fly that they will choose as a roost? What happens when they get old? Do they go to an “old birds home in a rest home tree somewhere?” Why do they kick their young out of the nest when they barely have enough feathers to keep them warm? Don’t they know that it’s a long way to the ground and their babies may not be quite ready to make the transition from nest to free flight? How do they feel when one of their babies falls out of the nest because it was made too small to hold all the babies in the first place? How do the mommy birds know which mouth to shove the tasty worm into or do they just randomly stuff the open beaks and squawking chicks? I like it that chickens just get out of the eggs and begin pecking. They don’t have to be kicked out of any nest and they don’t have to worry about falling onto the ground from high up in the tree. Chickens are just ‘lucky ducks’ that way.
At our home in Arizona we have trees in our backyard that are sometimes alive with Mexican Jays. They hang around the feeder and flash blue feathers when they fly. One day I heard a great noise in the back yard of the Jays squawking and squawking. I looked out in time to see a raptor wrestling one of them to the ground and when he saw me, he grabbed the hapless bird and soared up into the sky. As soon as he was gone, the birds stopped squawking. There is two ways of looking at it. One is that the raptor was gone and everyone was safe so no more need to make noise. The second way of looking at it is that they were telling each other to head for the trees but Charlie thought he needed one more seed and so he was silly enough to play the odds and lost. They were trying to warn him of his ‘devil may care’ attitude but he was not listening and he was not heard of again either. This year there was a raptor nest in the pine tree in front of the church. The mother bird made numerous flights between the tree and the high school grounds, returning each time with a small mammal in her talons. Guess there is an unlimited supply of those on the high school grounds. I could hear her babies screeching as she fed them.
In Mesa, down on Dobson Road, there were some very old trees in which the Grackles used to like to congregate during migration season. They were anything but calm and collected. Well, collected they were in the trees, but they had a lot to say about who sat where on the limbs. Then there are the starlings, or are they boat tail grackles (I cannot see what they are for sure) that seem to flock to the cottonwoods down on the bottom end of Ruth Street, Prescott. They screech and argue and make such a din that one cannot even hear what else may be going on. In today’s Kennebec Journal they have a picture of starlings in Scotland that are flocking and they call it a murmuration of starlings. Now that is a new term for me. I noticed also in the comics today there is one comic that shows a lady sitting in her living room talking to a friend and a bunch of Canada Geese are streaming through the room. The caption underneath says, “We are in the migratory path of the Canada Geese, so we have to leave the windows open till mid November.” In Lincoln there is a lake at the Nature Center Park that always seems to have Canada Geese in residence. I have seen them swimming with their babies in the spring, fed them bread in the Summer and seen them standing on the iced over pond in the winter. Why they don’t fly south to warmer climes is beyond me. They are truly beautiful birds but their droppings make the lake shore a hazardous place to walk. They tell me that here in Maine they have Loons and I hope to see some while we are here. I also would like to see Puffins, but since we are inland, all we get to see of the seabirds are the seagulls.
When we lived in Mesa, we had a bougainvillea bush in the back yard. There was a group of sparrows that regularly landed in it and were arguing supremacy really loudly. One day I forgot to take the bag of birdseed inside and had left it on the picnic table and I looked out to see all of them attacking the bag and having their fill of seeds. We also had some hummingbirds build nests in our trees in Mesa. One bird built a nest in the Lemon tree and I used a mirror to look at the babies when the mother was not there. It is hard to believe how small humming bird babies really are. But then the eggs are not the largest things in the world either. God does well making miniatures. Another hummingbird built her nest in the bottle tree and her babies were not so lucky. We had a dust storm with strong winds and I watched the nest swinging back and forth and then the babies fell out when a branch collided with the branch holding the nest.
I do like birds and so I have written about them. It has been a slow day in the Archives – all we did all day was digitize but I spent some of the time daydreaming about birds and how lucky they are to be able to fly about outside in the sunshine. Lucky ducks!
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