"The Backyard Bird Chronicles", ("The Comfort of Crows")

[fiefoe]

I appreciate Amy Tan's tunnel vision when it comes to bird-watching. Let's bury our heads in the sand while we can.

• Foreword: I think the most basic reason we enjoy birdwatching (and the same reason we enjoy other outdoor hobbies like gardening and fishing) is that it directs our attention outside, where we see the sunrise, feel cool mist or hot sun, watch an approaching storm, get bitten by mosquitoes, taste wild blackberries, and so on.
• I added fifteen Derwent waxy colored pencils in hues of nature, then twenty-four Prismacolors, thirty-six Verithins, forty-eight Polychromos, seventy-six Caran d’Ache Luminance, and a box of expensive pan pastels, which I ultimately decided were too messy to use. I also bought better sketchbooks, but they weren’t better for the kind of drawings I did. I bought two antique tansu cabinets (at amazingly low prices) to hold the supplies that overflowed the cubbies, drawers, and shelves of my office. My husband and close friends know I am obsessive this way. (Twenty-three years ago, my love for my dogs led to my co-owning a show dog that became the number one Yorkshire terrier in the country and won breed at Westminster.)
• * Our roof garden was designed to offer a friendly habitat and food source for bees, butterflies, and birds. Seven types of flowering succulents bloom white, yellow, or pink flowers at different times of the year. I like to imagine birds using our colorful roof as the flyway sign to their fall migration getaway. Thanks to the birds, invasive plants always take root on the roof—oxalis, burr clover, Santa Margarita daisies, and coyote brush among them—their seeds delivered by wind and in bird poop. Sprouted acorns on the roof, planted by Scrub Jays and squirrels, must be regularly dug out. If I were selling this house to a bird, I would point out that water runoff from the green roof flows down rain chains with jingling bell cups, on which a little bird and its growing family can perch while drinking and enjoying a view of San Francisco Bay. <> My home is the backyard’s complement, built to give the feeling of an open pavilion.
• The glass doors next to the patio have hand-drawn white spider webs from top to bottom to prevent bird collisions. When standing on the verandah, I am at eye level with birds that are just below the oak canopy—titmice, chickadees, warblers, nuthatches.
• I then bought squirrel-proof seed feeders and discovered how smart squirrels truly are. I bought baffles and more highly touted squirrel-proof feeders, which brought out the athleticism of squirrels. I then went insane and built my own squirrel-proof cage feeders, which also kept out crows and Scrub Jays. I changed to hot pepper suet and seeds that the squirrels hated. I stored thousands of live mealworms in the fridge, without complaint from my husband. And this was just the beginning. My search for the right feeders and food became pathological. But I did find the most successful lure is also the cheapest: shallow saucers of fresh water for bathing and drinking.
• * CREATING THIS JOURNAL has been different from writing a novel. A novel is torment. It needs structure, tending of language, constant shaping, refinement, excision, and cumulative insights that might give it breath and breadth. I have to carry a thousand pieces in an increasingly complex configuration toward the luminous vision of a story that remains a mirage. I am driven to make each piece as perfect as I hope it can be, while making the story that is composed of those pieces feel spontaneous, effortless, and without gyre and gimble showing at the seams. <> In contrast, creating The Backyard Bird Chronicles was pure fun, spontaneous, a bit of a mess, come what may... I could respect science and also allow playful anthropomorphism and a lot of wild guesses. Unlike fiction, I didn’t need to hope the story pulled together. The story was the moment in front of me, one day, one page, one sketch.
  Yet I also think my impulse to observe birds comes from the same one that led me to become a fiction writer. By disposition, I am an observer. I want to know why things happen. I need to feel the gut kick of strong emotions. I am drawn to see details, patterns, and aberrations that suggest a more interesting truth.
• With both fiction and birds, I think about existence, the span of life, from conception to birth to survival to death to remembrance by others. I reflect on mortality, the strangeness of it, the inevitability... With every adult bird I see, I think it’s a miracle it is before me, because 75 percent of young songbirds die before the end of their first year. When I try to find the right image and words that capture an emotion, I must beat down clichés and homilies, which are devoid of fresh thought and honest contemplation. When I see a bird that has died, I don’t accept the sanguine saying, “It’s the circle of life.” It is good to mourn and wish it weren’t so.
• After a minute, the hummingbird shot up into the oak tree. He had remained on the hand feeder for forty-five seconds. Or maybe my excitement had lengthened the actual duration of that moment, one that altered my life. I had gained entry into a wild animal’s world. It was my own backyard with a portal big enough for the bird I imagined myself to be.
• I now know too much about this disease. Its fluffed-out feathers were a futile attempt to stay warm because it could no longer thermoregulate. Its messy beak was due to an inability to swallow. Its half-closed eyes confirmed the ebbing of life.
• The direction of their eyes is crucial. They suggest the intent of their behavior. Right now, it’s difficult to know where to place the eye when I am drawing the changing shape of the head from different angles.
• Okay, I admit I placed the dummy crow hanging upside down on the rail next to the patio. Our yard was becoming a crow hangout, which scared the other birds.
• Anna’s Hummingbird: From rereading Bernd Heinrich’s The Nesting Season, I learned that female birds may not produce eggs immediately after mating. They cache the sperm and build the nest first. When the nest is ready, they release ovum to be fertilized with the cached sperm. Such a smart system. Like an in-vitro fertilization clinic, but a lot cheaper.
• Bernd Heinrich has a pretty good estimate of the amount of food nestlings can take in. He found featherless sapsucker nestlings that had been killed falling out of their nest. The stomachs contained half their weight in ants.
• But I have heard experienced birders call the Lesser Goldfinch a “trash bird” because it is so common and numerous. I heard others call a House Sparrow a “junk” bird, an invasive, like the European Starling. I understand the antipathy. Invasive birds usurp habitat and resources. But I can’t help but feel discomfort. The rhetoric is often the same as the racist ones I hear about Chinese people.
• How much does curiosity and persistence play a role in a bird’s chances of survival? <> I have a new opinion of Hermit Thrushes. They are not shy and secretive. They are solitary nonconformists.
• Do birds recognize individual birds of their own kind in the same vicinity? What details do they see that we humans don’t? Do they recognize their adult progeny or nest-mates? Do they recognize one-season mates? Do they recognize me? Maybe I should first ask why they would need to remember another bird or human?
• The Fox Sparrow looked down at its feet, as if wondering what was hindering its movement. Its body was puffed up, and combined with its stillness, I knew that the bird was clearly in distress... It is remarkable what birds can endure. It is tragic what they cannot. I am hoping this bird is remarkable.
• Today she came to the feeder stand where I had tied a twig ball filled with alpaca wool, a gift of our vet, Kathy. The titmouse pulled out a bit. At first, she seemed to be eating the wisps. She held it in her beak, and then using her foot, she drew the strands back and forth repeatedly. I guessed she might be testing the alpaca wool’s tensile strength, fluffiness, and ability to withstand dampness. She approved and pulled at the wool ball fifteen or so times until she had a clump that looked almost as big as she was. She flew off looking like a little floating cloud... Fluff is the finishing touch a titmouse uses to line the nest. The alpaca wool she collected means her nest is nearly done.
• * Everything, including food sources, is new and I watched them investigate what is edible. One fledgling appeared shocked when the mealworm in its beak wiggled. Startled, the baby flung the mealworm into the air and watched it fall to the ground, like a human baby in a highchair. It took another from the bowl.
• * I think they discover by happenstance what in their expanding world is fun to do, just like I did as a kid wading through the creek. Part of the fun is discovering what’s fun.
• *  I find almost everything about the towhee is comical. I love how it walks with a beer belly in a stately legato while the junco moves in pizzicato hops. I love its longing look when it cannot reach a tasty tidbit right away. I love its sudden burst of excitement while jumping and kicking dirt backward to roust the worms and insects. I love the way it pretends it is the king of ground feeders. I saw this same towhee slip into a mealworm cage feeder and drop mealworms into the flowerpot below. It then flew down to the flowerpot, kicked up dirt, and showed a sudden burst of excitement over its sham discovery. Oh my, what’s this? A worm? Is that an avian version of make-believe? If it is doing this to impress a female, wouldn’t that be false advertising? Or maybe a female would admire its trickery. I did.
• The scene: six terra-cotta saucers and one plastic turquoise bowl. I fill to a depth of an inch to an inch and a half, and place a rock in each one so that arriving migrants know immediately that the water depth is safe... Songbirds can’t swim like ducklings.
• I asked Bernd Heinrich if he knew why feeder birds, like finches, discard so many seeds... The short answer: Songbirds prefer shorter, fatter unshelled sunflower seeds, more depth than length, because they contain more oil. They take half a second to judge the seeds, dropping the low-density ones, until they find a seed to their liking. It is not unlike my thumping a watermelon to assess density as a factor in sweetness, only I don’t throw the rejected melons on the store floor.
• Now, whenever a goldfinch rejects a seed, the seed remains in the saucer. The birds were like reformed shoppers who have learned to put rejected fruit back in the bin. <> With bird feeders, mess management and marauding rats will remain a work in progress. For now, I deserve a trophy for outsmarting the squirrels.
• Now, whenever I look out the bathroom window, I see the bandit-faced Townsend’s Warbler in the round suet feeder two feet away. They are a reliable bird, a satisfying bird, there first thing in the morning, and among the last birds to visit the feeders before dark. In fact, when they first arrived they visited almost all of the fifteen different feeders, even the ones for the hummingbirds, which contain nothing more than sugar water.
• * I cut down to one bowl and I refill as needed, which amounts to around 1,000 a day. I rationalize the cost of mealworms by calculating the amount of money I have saved by not having children. I would have been funding college tuition for grandkids by now. I can justify buying mealworms by the millions.
• I did find a possible answer to the belly dance movement. Birds have dual-chambered stomachs. They push down the food in the crop into the chamber with digestive juices. The other chamber contains the gizzard, along with grit, which grinds the food.
• Instincts, like those related to migration, can be scientifically verified repeatedly. Trying to figure out a bird’s intentions runs afoul of anthropomorphism. I cannot possibly know what a bird’s intentions are. How do I know what it needs? I remind myself that the guesses are only that. Yet I still can’t help wanting to know what is really going on. It’s like what I do with fiction. One character’s intentions and what another wants to believe are the beginning of a story, always subject to change.
• All these sightings occurred within the same hour and should have remained simply a pleasant coincidence. However, I’ve long hoped in a wistful, wishful way that people I’ve loved and lost might return in some form to provide a better farewell. If the person came as a bird, it would have to be strikingly different to enable me to distinguish it from the usual avian crowd... If three critters are indeed a visitation, then this was overkill. And that, too, was Asa—over the top, excessive in every way. I can hear him yelling in exaggerated exasperation: “How many times do I have to get into animal drag for you to acknowledge it’s really me?”
• I give kudos to Scrub Jays for their ingenuity and persistence. I too am persistent. I tried a kinder approach: a large nut-encrusted cone of suet, just for Scrub Jays, hung on the other side of the house, away from the songbird feeders. They haven’t touched it. Too easy.
• But the most special is the bird that pauses when it is eating, looks and acknowledges I am there, then goes back to what it was doing.

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(The Comfort of Crows by Margaret Renkl)
Got to Spring Week 11/chapter 37 and couldn't go on because of the doom and gloom. I might not have minded had the book title been less misleading.

• To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work. —Mary Oliver
• Stop and ponder the skeleton of the snakeroot plant, each twig covered in tiny brown stars. The white petals, once embraced by bees, have dried to powder and now dust the forest floor, but here are the star-shaped sepals that held those fluffs of botanical celebration.
• Stop and listen to the ragged-edged beech leaves, pale specters of the winter forest. They are chattering ghosts, clattering amid the bare branches of the other hardwoods. Wan light pours through their evanescence and burnishes them to gleaming.
• The world lies before you, a lavish garden. However hobbled by waste, however fouled by graft and tainted by deception, it will always take your breath away.
• Age has given me an internal source of warmth, and hubris has given us all a burning planet, but I still love the seasons of light and color.
• Nothing in nature exists as a metaphor, but human beings are reckless metaphor makers anyway, and only a fool could fail to find the lesson here.
• Crows have been observed conducting “funerals” for fallen flock mates, and this somber ritual may account for the gloomy associations, too.
• A fox in a covered trap is calmer than a fox in a trap with open sides. The stick is for when I catch the opossum. A raccoon will dash away as soon as I open the trap door, but an opossum will ponder a while: What’s the rush? There’s bacon here.
• I think of the fox’s balletic moves, of the way its slender legs and swift, small feet are tucked beneath its body now, its bushy tail a perfect parenthesis curving around the perfect closing word.
• * the fox vanishes. It is not a fox. It is a blur of falling leaves, red and gold. A phantom rush of wildness. A mirage of a miracle, pungent and swift.
• * Most species of native bees—or their fertilized queens, at least—hibernate underground during winter. An industrious gardener pulling up dead annuals could expose them to the cold, and one who mulches too thickly could block their escape in spring. Other beneficial insects like ladybugs, lacewings, and parasitic wasps spend winter in the hollow stems of old flowers.
• Maybe it was just his time to go. But I think often of that stunning redbird lying crooked in the snow, a fallen battle flag, a bleeding wound, a Shakespearean hero come to a terrible end.
• I’m not trying to hide from the truth but to balance it, to remind myself that there are other truths, too. I need to remember that the earth, fragile as it is, remains heartbreakingly beautiful. I need to give my attention to a realm that is indifferent to fretful human mutterings and naked human anger, a world unaware of the hatred and distrust taking over the news.
• A beech tree in a winter forest gives off its own light in the same way that dogwood blossoms in springtime look like tiny ground-borne suns.
• Not deer fur: dog hair. Not evidence of a ground forager: Christmas-tree needles.
  I couldn’t decide which was worse, disappointment or embarrassment. Over on social media, the wags were amused. “A Hoover pellet,” wrote one.
  “A Hoover hooter pellet,” added another.
• *the downy woodpeckers: They swoop to their feast with the characteristic undulating flight of their kind. In the years when I get around to hanging Christmas garland, I always try to arrange it in a way that mimics the arc of their flight.
• * Ravens have been known to windsurf at the beach, holding a bit of driftwood in their feet for ballast. Crows will ride down snowy roofs on flat objects they put to use as sleds. Again and again, they haul their toy to the roofline and toboggan down the slope in what looks for all the world like playing.
• During migration seasons, crows will devour the exhausted songbirds themselves. Nothing is harder to love about the natural world—or the human world—than its ceaseless brutality.
• Plant life, like all life, is the subject of constant revision. —Ann Patchett, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage
• * Paying attention to what is happening to the natural world can be a form of self-torment, and I sometimes wonder how much longer I can keep seeing the losses that surround me and not descend into a kind of despair that might as well be called madness.
• What caught my eye was a cluster of chickweed seedlings colored the new green of springtime, so bright they seemed to glow. They were growing in the loam inside the knothole. Far above the ground, a hole made by decay in a living tree had become a cold frame, a natural greenhouse that let in light and kept out frost. Life in death in life.
• I refuse to quell this joy. It’s possible to understand what invasive species are doing to the woods and still feel the leaping heart of joy in the presence of greenness... In this troubled world, it would be a crime to snuff out any flicker of happiness that somehow flames up into life.
• * Take your cue from the bluebirds, who have no faith in the future but who build the future nevertheless, leaf by leaf and straw by straw, shaping them into the roundness of the world.
• If we sell our house, the next owner will tear it down, along with all its trees and all its flowers and all its berry-bearing vines and shrubs, and then where will the bluebirds go? Where will the butterflies feed and the lightning bugs sleep? What high grass will the shy rat snake slip through?
• The future no longer spreads out before me like an endless opportunity, like a sensible vessel for any plans I might conceive. It doesn’t seem fair that the future is contracting exactly as each day has begun to pass so quickly I can hardly remember one from another.
• * Apocalyptic stories always get the apocalypse wrong. The tragedy is not the failed world’s barren ugliness. The tragedy is its clinging beauty even as it fails. Until the very last cricket falls silent, the beauty-besotted will find a reason to love the world.
• It was stickywilly in the fields of Lower Alabama, and it remains stickywilly to me all these years later in Tennessee. What you call the wildflowers will tell you who you are.
• Even when it is pointed in the right direction, a camera has a way of stunting sight. How truly valuable is a device that makes you take your eyes from an experience so momentary you might miss it altogether?
• We can see some of the creatures we share our world with, or at least some evidence of their nearness, but we cannot know the full arc of their story. Every encounter in the outdoors is an episode with a cliffhanger ending.