I don't take a lot of photos of birds in my back yard. I'm too busy gazing at them with curiosity and delight. So once again I thank Wikimedia for supplying a stand-in image for me.
This is a white-crowned sparrow. This is the first year I've had these visitors, and they are much shyer than the chickadees and finches, far far shyer than the starlings and their young. But they've gradually decided my small enclosed yard is a safe place, with lots of food and water and plants to hide behind. They're ground-feeding birds, so I don't see them at the feeder. Sometimes they get brave and graze underneath it on fallen seeds, and since the feeder is so close to the window I get to see them frequently. But today! Ah, today.
Today I was sitting in the yard, away from the feeders so as not to be in the road, drinking my tea and pretending to read my book. A pair of adult white-crowned sparrows appeared in the yard with two very young-seeming, but large, offspring. They were maybe three metres from me at first, looking for food or, if they got close to each other, begging for food (babies), stuffing food in mouths (parents), or chasing each other off of choice tidbits.
Over several minutes they worked their way down the yard and garden toward me. I began to realise that the juveniles weren't behaving the same as one another. One worked busily, like the adults, and that was the one most likely to demand food from the folks. The other seemed a bit of a dreamer.
This one wandered slowly, by a meandering path, in my direction. I of course remain still when their are birds nearby, but I was surprised by just how close this little one came.Oh, I forgot! When still about a metre and a half away, s/he picked up a piece of food from the grass and moved it around in her beak as she carried it. It seemed like a tiny blade of grass or some such thing.
It was a feather. S/he didn't eat the feather. It was more like you or I might roll a straw around in our mouths while we ponder life.
At last s/he was so close s/he disappeared from sight and I held my breath, waiting for a peck on my bare foot. None came. She curved back into sight and made her way over to the bird bath, which had been losing runoff into the grass below it and was now lightly trickling down. Baby hopped back in surprise when a drop landed on her. She moved forward again and hopped back again when another drop hit her. Over and over she hopped out of the stream of drips and then set into it again. She began rubbing her feathers against the wet grasses--short, to my eyes, but tall as she was and then some. At last she fluttered around in the wet grasses and miniature shower and had a lovely little bath. Last I noticed her before they all nibbled their way from the yard, she was lying belly down in the cool dirt, wings slightly extended, enjoying the sensation (presumably) as her sibling remained busily feeding on everything in sight.
It had never occurred to me that two such young birds would be so very different in personality as these displayed today. S/he didn't seem sick at all, just a bit dreamy. (I can identify; my childhood was largely spent staring at tiny insects and revelling in the sensation of walking bare foot in hot road dust and warm cow pies.)
What a wonder and a joy it has been to spend this season with the young who have spent so much time in my yard. I am grateful to their parents for bringing them, and to Erminia for renting me this place, and to B.C. Housing for subsidising my rent. It is a miracle. A miracle to see, and be, and witness.
Image: "White-Crowned Sparrow / (Zonotrichia leucophrys)." Photo by Wolfgang Wander. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
