The Birds!

The birds have taken over the backyard. Hitchcock never prepared me for this. It’s not scary, but it is overwhelming. They are everywhere and there are a lot of them. I’ve read about their general decline, in numbers. A distressing, catastrophic decline.

But, out there, past the porch, it sure doesn’t seem like it. Maybe it’s that I am really appreciating them for the first time. Actually noticing them. They are so wild. And, some of them, are huge. Their wings flap, as if in slow motion. A whop, whop, whopping, as they cross from left to right or, sometimes, right to left. Their calls echo in an eerie manner. They swoop down and speed off with small rodents and dearly beloved pets, clutched in their deadly talons. And, some are so small that, if I’m not careful, they will buzz right up and bore into my skull with their sharp little beaks.

Okay, they’re not just scary, they are amazing. Worthy of study, not just by ornithologists, but by completely untutored guys, like myself. One of the wonderful things that bird watchers do is keep lists. Lists of birds seen, when seen, what was going on, weather conditions, distinctive markings, and whatever else seems pertinent. This gives me an excuse to introduce a small and incomplete, but somehow poetic list, of the ones I’ve seen, right in my own backyard, and put it right here on the page. Here goes: eagles, owls, hawks of all kinds, vultures, crows, ravens, magpies, meadowlarks, starlings, robins, grosbeaks, sparrows, finches, and hummingbirds.

And, when I lived a couple of miles away, next to what Minnesotans would call a pond, but what they designate here as a lake, I saw cormorants, ducks of all kinds, geese (Canadian and otherwise), and, my favorite, White Pelicans, gliding far up, their black feathers contrasting with the immaculate white of the rest of them, on some miraculous breeze, seeing the country on what might be the ultimate road trip. They are beautiful.

Birds. You can’t deny it. They’re wild. They can fly. And, they can sing like crazy.

You have probably guessed that we don’t have the normal kind of backyard. We are lucky, beyond our dreams, to have a big field in back of the house. On one side, it runs up to the foothills of the Rockies and, on the other, slopes down toward Nebraska or, if you get lost, Kansas. It’s big. It’s open. The sky is huge. It used to be the Wild West, but now it’s almost a suburb. We’re trying to live together with the birds, but everybody has their own needs and theirs are a little different than ours. It’s not a simple thing.

That decline I mentioned before is one that, I am afraid, we are responsible for. Big and clumsy as we are, we have encroached on their habitat, squeezing them out and replacing everything with houses that are a bit more than we need or can even figure out how to decorate, and swimming pools and shopping centers and Dairy Queens and a lot of other things that seem absolutely necessary.

And that’s only part of the problem. There are the sad, catastrophic, and fatal results of Global Warming: unnatural weather, drought, heat, fires, floods, tornados, hurricanes, and a general disruption of seasons and status quo. CO2, pesticides, hunting, toxic substances, and an ever-expanding covering of concrete. It’s a dilemma.

We are so outnumbered by birds and insects, that it seems we can’t notice any problems until they become huge, major predicaments, with disastrous overtones. It’s been a gradual thing and, like I said, there are tons of birds, but that’s why it’s hard to get a handle on just how things are changing. These birds are asking for our help. Well, chirping for it and, if we could understand what they were saying, maybe things would be different. We need to make some serious changes. I don’t think birdseed and a few crumbs are going to be enough.