The birds don't know

we are watching them. They just come for the food. It's funny, though, how some of them seem to pose for the camera. A pause in their eating to ponder themselves on the screen. Why do I think they are thinking? 

And if they are thinking, what thoughts are they--

Wait, is that a cardinal? How absurd and serious he is with his beady eyes. Another bird caught mid-flight, wings raised like medieval monster. And the squirrels... As my friend Deb likes to say, What a hoot! 

I mean, 

LOOK AT THIS: 

AND THIS:

AND THIS!

That last one was a squirrel. 

We think. There's also a possibility of a possum. One of those popped up at three o'clock in the morning. How it all works is my husband gets a notification on his phone whenever motion is detected. This whole birdfeeder/video thing was a Father's Day present, which means he's only had it out in the backyard for a week. 

But already, I am addicted to it. Checking every movement. Screen-shotting the funny ones, the cute ones, the weirdos. A perfect distraction for me this week because I had my surgery. Did I tell you about my surgery? Well, it was nothing. Just one of those doublecheck-it/in-and-out things. Hardly even any pain. But still,

enough that I was happy for the distraction. When I was waiting to go under, I just wanted it to be over with, and when it was over with, I was so glad it was behind me, is behind me. And now, back to the birds.

How did I come to be a person who delights in watching birds? Does this mean I am old?

Did you ever read the poem "Letters from a Father" by Mona Van Duyn? Here it is. I'll wait, if you want to read it. I read it now myself and got a lump in my throat, exactly how I did when I first read it a million years ago when I was in graduate school. Of course back then I identified with the daughter. 

And I admit, I was skeptical. Could she really woo her old crochety parents back to life so easily, simply by sending them a birdfeeder? 

Hahaha, absolutely. Yes. 

 

The black bird on the patio

is sleek and beautiful, the feathers iridescent and I love it immediately, spending a couple of days trying to catch it on our bird feeder, so I can sneak up quietly and take a picture. Ever since the weirdo Cardinal incident of March 2021, I've been obsessed with the birds in my backyard. 

The main character in the book I'm working on is a bird expert and I freely admit I know next to nothing about them, but I am eager to learn. Confession: I used to think bird-watching was a boring hobby. Who has time to sit around watching birds? Also, I have that poem Letters from a Father by Mona Van Duyn in my head, and while I love that poem, it has always made me associate bird-watching with old people. 

Maybe I am an old person now though because I am getting a kick out of watching these birds. This sleek lovely black one, for example. I have a bird identifying book on my kitchen counter, right by the window where the bird feeder hangs, so I can easily look up who is who. The black one is too small to be a Blackbird. It's not speckled enough to be a Starling. I find a match, the Cowbird, and I am so excited, 

for about two seconds.

Cowbirds are what they call brood parasites. The female follows other birds around, finds where they're nesting, and sneaks in and lays eggs in the other birds' nests. The unsuspecting bird nester bird sits on the Cowbird's eggs. And get this: the Cowbird eggs are bigger and when those birds hatch, they crowd out the others or even push the other baby birds out, which honestly, seems so shitty and selfish

and sad. And even worse, in our yard, because if you remember what happened with the freaky Cardinal, my husband taped a box up under the porch eaves in case it needed a safe warm place to burrow or whatever you call it. Well, the Cardinal didn't bother with the box, but a lovely Mourning Dove couple moved in,

and now I can see the Mourning Dove mother sitting on her eggs (IS ONE OF THEM A COWBIRD EGG??!!), the father coo-coo-cooing close by, the asshole Cowbirds hopping around our bird feeder and I feel totally complicit in the whole mess. 

But as a side note, my bird book did point out that while the Cowbird's nesting (or rather, not-nesting) style is detrimental to many songbirds, it's not a 100% sure thing for them either, evolutionarily-speaking. Many birds, when they notice the Cowbird egg, abandon the nest. Some Cowbirds do end up being raised by the unsuspecting foster birds, but they never imprint on their own kind and therefore never mate themselves. In the end something like only 3% of all Cowbirds survive past the nesting stage. 

Two of them are in my backyard. Damn it. 

Male Mourning Dove watching nearby

Female Mourning Dove possibly about to hatch a Cowbird

The other night my daughter saw a weird bird

She was letting out the dogs. And there it was under the eaves on the back porch. A red bird, just sitting there, she said, looking down at her in a creepy way. 

It must be that cardinal, I told her. We'd seen him around the yard and this was a cold night, ten degrees. Maybe the bird was trying to get out of the cold? Was it safe for birds to be outside on a night like this? My husband immediately went into research mode. 

He set out sunflowers seeds and found a small box and put tissues inside of it and hung it up on the back porch where the bird had been. And then we all forgot about it. A few weeks went by and now we have a box nailed up under the porch eaves. A year from now it will probably still be there and one day we'll look up and think, wait, why is there a box nailed up under the porch eaves? 

It's easy to get used to strange things. 

This year of all years. My husband bopping around the house in his pajamas all day, our grown daughter living at home again. The masks and social distancing signs. Zoom holiday gatherings and virtual festivals. Sometimes I have the feeling that we're living in a simulation. 

Or maybe we're trapped in a weirdo offshoot of a multiverse. How can any of this be real? 

We're tired and we want it to be over. When it IS over, we'll pretend it never happened. We'll eat out at restaurants again and invite people into our homes, barefaced. We'll push our carts through the grocery store aisles in any direction we choose. 

I took the dogs out the other night. It was dark and cold. Something rustled above me and I looked up. There was the red bird, only a foot away from my head. It was frozen. Eyes black and staring right at me. I can't adequately describe how unsettling it was. It didn't look real. How still it was. How close. 

What world do we live in now?