My father loves birds. When he and my mother were first married, they had a parakeet named Zeus. After a couple of incidents where my father deliberately let the bird out of the cage when my mother was doing dishes so it could divebomb her, and her threats to drown it, I think they decided that they would admire birds only in nature from then on. And so, in most of the places we've lived, we've fed the birds and had birdhouses. In fact, the angriest I have ever seen my father get was when I was a teenager, and a crow swooped in and stole a baby robin out of its nest in one of our pine trees. The next year, as if God knew we needed a policeman in the yard, a mockingbird family took up residence. We never had a problem with the crows after that.
One of the neat things about the place that we've lived here in Virginia is the variety of birds that come to our feeder. We could sit at the kitchen table or out on the back porch and watch the birds while we were eating: we almost didn't need the TV or the newspaper. And I now can identify a number of birds by their markings and even, sometimes, by their song, thanks to this incredible gift of birds. Some of the birds we've seen include: towhees, titmice, cardinals, blue jays, bluebirds, sparrows, mourning doves, brown-headed cowbirds, Carolina wrens, indigo buntings, chickadees, goldfinches, purple finches, woodpeckers of various kinds, crows, and mockingbirds, catbirds, and brown thrashers, as well as hummingbirds. (That's not an exhaustive list by any means.) There was one chickadee who liked to splash around in the water that we put out for the birds to drink (not a bird bath, but a bird waterer) and we called him/her "clean chick".
I remember one day when I drove home from somewhere or other, there was a black racer snake in the driveway. Now, I have a phobia of snakes. I'm just scared to death of them. But even so, I'm not going to kill it just because I don't like it. God made snakes, too, even if I shudder at them, and the snake had a right to be there, too. So I managed to drive around it and park the car in my spot in the driveway. But now, I was in a dilemma, because the snake lay directly in the path from the car to the front door of the house. As I sat in the car and pondered what to do, out of nowhere, a mockingbird swooped down and chased the snake off into the bushes. Thanking God and the mockingbird, I got out of the car and rushed into the house before the snake could reappear.
As we are preparing to leave the house, my parents decided to let the bird seed in the feeder run out and not to refill it, even though we have plenty of bird seed left in the garage. But last night, we happened to look out the window and see that a bird, trying to get at seed that was pushed way back out of reach in the feeder, had gotten its head stuck in one of the holes of the feeder. So, we all went out there and Dad basically destroyed the feeder in order to get the bird unstuck. Miraculously, the bird seemed unhurt, and hopped off into the bushes to recover, chirping the whole way. Hopefully it was chirping in gratitude for Dad's help rather than chirping in anger at us for letting the seed run out and causing it to get stuck.
Today my parents' real estate agent came over to the house to talk to my parents about stuff, and mentioned how he had become a fan of the birds by watching the birds at our feeder out of the kitchen window. He said that after we leave this week, he would continue feeding the birds until the seed that we have left in the garage runs out. Who knows--after that he may buy some more and continue feeding them, if he hasn't gotten the house sold by then, that is.
Where my parents live in Florida offers new kinds of birds for viewing--mainly water birds like egrets, cormorants, and herons, although in the winter they had a bald eagle couple nesting on a nearby cell phone tower. While those birds are neat to watch, too, I will miss the steady friends of the Eastern woodlands, whose antics I have laughed at over the years, whose colors I have admired, and even whose songs I have learned to identify. Hopefully whoever moves in to this house will continue to feed these beautiful birds.
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