DECEMBER Out the Window: My Life in Birds 2002 (

A winter story

)

Winter’s wild birds come to my back porch feeder for black oil sunflower seeds,

thistle & suet. Out the kitchen window I watch them come and go. They make me smile, unselfconsciously, like a baby kicking for joy simply because a bright, pretty object jiggles before her eyes. I call them my pets even though I cannot own them. But that is part of their beauty, an impermanence that can only be watched from a distance like sunsets and waves and clouds. The little ones

–

the black-capped chickadee,sparrow, tufted titmouse, finch or nuthatch or warbler

–

might stay for the count of ten,but the male cardinal often holds court for quite some time and makes me late for school. His appearance is too much to look away from and too uncertain. My children

often hear me gasp, “Mr. Cardinal, Mr. Cardinal!” He is benevolent and regal, allowing

the little ones to tumble down around him to sneak a snack and, in a rare moment of nature, I once saw him feed his female by cracking seed covers with his beak perhaps because she was unable. In opposition there is the blue jay, his reputation and beautiful cerulean blue diminished by impoliteness, bullying, and squawking. He scatters the little ones like a bowling ball strikes pins, denying them their place. But they always come back. As timorous as they are, if I sit statue-still underneath the feeder they will come and I will feel their small, furious vibration like tiny angels. They risk their lives for sustenance because of hoodlum cats that loiter in the yard and hunker down like snipers under the porch. Who would want to be a bird? For all its simple pleasures, their world is also filled with brevity, harshness, and a constant state of alert. But so is ours. I pause over the morning paper strewn with an inordinate

number of people’s lives ending on our local highways. Lives that were ended because

someone was late, someone was trying to catch up by going too fast on the roads

travel, in the places

could have been. I have never seen birds crash into each other.I go out to rake a last pile of leaves and uncover a decomposing lump of gray feathers.

I’ve seen this before. I’ve even seen blood spots on the w

hite porch railings and can only guess which one of my pets it was. I cannot cage the birds; I cannot control the