School Day for Chickadee

I was in my garden today, the little one just beyond my patio, when a pair of chickadees arrived at the feeder. It's just a simple thing, a shallow frame made of wood with a screen bottom, suspended from a garden hook by wires. Inside the feeder I have a couple of jam jar lids filled with shelled and broken sunflower seeds, a tiny bowl of peanuts, and another tiny bowl of suet balls.

There was a brief fracas when they first arrived at the feeder and one flew a metre and a bit away while the other (at a guess, I would say, it's parent) fed. When the first one had had its fill it flew back into the maples and chickadee number two ventured over. First to the top of the feeder stand. Then over to the fence. Then back, closer, landing on top of the suet block cage. And repeat. Finally, when the coast seemed truly clear, it made a bold hop to the feeder with the sunflower seeds.

It landed, as I have seen it's relatives the bushtits sometimes do, upside down on the bottom of the screen. This didn't work very well so it flew back to the suet feeder, then back to the fence, then to the bottom of the screen again.

Meanwhile, the sun shone, bumblebees climbed into the mouths of waiting bellflowers, a hover-fly inspected the sedum, and a bald-faced hornet searched for something low down among the leaves. I glanced over at the hole in the fence this chickadee likely hatched out in. It had been taken over by bumblebees after the chicks had fledged and now I noticed there is an impressive funnel shaped web opening around the entrance to the cavity. It's delightful to think of the succession of creatures making use of that one small hole in so short a period of time.

At this point the more confident chickadee returned. Our unsuccessful diner appears to have paid better attention to what its associate did this time: It landed inside the feeder, spent a moment or two snatching up sunflower seeds, and returned to the trees. Immediately the young chickadee copied the action, landing on the upside of the feeder and settling down to eat.

Another skill acquired. There is so much to learn in our first year of life.

Image: "Poecile atricapillus 1513, A Black-capped Chickadee at Blanche Lake, Minnesota USA” by Tattooeddreamer, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Yard Bird Babies

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.

Glum Facts and the Power of Song

As you may know I have been contending with a few glum facts lately, in amongst the riches of life. The struggle to find new and welcome housing, a few private matters that are weighing me down, and now the love of my life, our community garden, is being torn up to make modular housing for homeless folk. The city says they will relocate us, to which I muse, why not put the modular housing in this new location and leave us be? You can't really "move" a garden. You can destroy one and start another, but the soil carefully tended takes a big step backward, and the soil they supplied last time was riddled with horsetail spores. But all that could be handled--who am I to begrudge the homeless?--except for one abiding concern. If they move it away from the Skytrain station, I may not have easy enough access to carry on there. So again we wait, this time for the eventual announcement of our garden's fate. In the meantime, I am mourning another loss.

However.

I have also been trying to inject a little singing into my days, the last few months. When I am away or horribly forgetful or horribly busy, that ends up just being me tweedly-dumming through the day. When I am home and see my "SING!" notecard on the counter while busying myself with other things, I run through a bunch of vocal exercises and when I really get it together, like today and yesterday, I pull out my big black binder of Irish songs and run through a few.

Today was "M" and "O". I admit there are still a lot of songs in the binder that I haven't learned (but with the internet I have more hope of finding their tunes), and too many more whose melodies I have forgotten, in the long interregnum between the days of yore when I learned and sang songs galore, enjoying them at Irish music sessions with the likes of Ken Howard and Michael Dooley, and the days of now, when I almost lost my ability to sing. I have missed that music-making very much.

So what good does it do to limber your vocal chords up and sing a few tunes on your own in your room? Isn't that a little pathetic? Isn't music made to be shared? Look at all those eager folk on Britain's Got Talent. To them, singing at home is only the beginning. For me, it may be an end in itself.

When I take an hour, or half an hour even, out of my day and offer it up to song, I feel as though I have repatriated myself in the country of my heart. My body, inside and out, is completely involved, with the workout of breath, posture, and so much more. My emotions are engaged. I strive to do the best I can vocally but also to feel the song in its fullness. The result of all of this is a wakening from at least some of the weight and dullness that come with constant worry and self-criticism, coming back from fear and regret to a complete moment in which the song and myself are the only things in the world--and that is joy.

So delight with me in the full throated strains of another dedicant of the gods of music. And then, taking his inspiration for your own, open your heart and sing.

Image: 'Rufous-naped Lark, Mirafra africana at Pilanesberg National Park, South Africa' by Derek Keats from Johannesburg, South Africa [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Video: English: "Singing seriema (Cariama cristata) at Areia city, from Brazil's northeast state Paraiba (PB).

Português: Seriema (Cariama cristata) cantando em Areia, cidade da Paraíba, Brasil" by Rhalah. Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.