Wayfaring Traveler: Life on the Wing

black-capped chickadee

Avian travelers are returning to warm afternoons and false spring in the Rocky Mountains.

In New England, it's vivid January, nor'easter winds and snow fall. I can still feel Maine island in my bones: cabin fever with yet more shoveling of walkways as snow drifts muffle form and sound.

I say, warm in the Rockies, but watching birds at the feeder means shearling bonnet, down jacket, gloves, camp chair and a quilt. There's still snow on north slopes and shady places.

The birds begin to accept me as part of the garden architecture, as I muse 1.5m from the feeder set high in an arching piñon pine.

Chickadees, singing chickadee.dee.dee, do their tidy business of extracting one sunflower seed, flitting to a neighboring branch and doing beak-jackhammer to extract the morsel.

Ditto the tufted titmouse, a pert little bird. One used to dart to my parents' back porch and eat seed from Mama's hand:

The messier munchers scatter seed and ground-hopping birds tidy up around my feet, tilting their heads---Is it safe?---to make sure I'm still doing St. Francis in the garden quietude.

A nearly crow-sized piñon jay, too big for feeder gymnastics, hops around my boots. Long beak for extracting pine nuts from cones, he tracks fallen seed and watches my watching him.

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Gold finches, brightening into spring breeding coloration from winter-dun to a startling canary yellow, flit among the branches. Though dainty, they make a royal mess, rooting around for the perfect munch-ette.

Flashes of rose-breast, another small finch, bring color to the browns and drab of winter:

The evening grosbeaks have arrived en masse, i.e., fat beaks, snouts in a herd of piglets. A big heavy bird with a beetle brow. To restrict their gorp-out access to the trough, I chose a bird feeder designed for the weight and size of smaller songbirds. Grosbeaks still manage to insert snouts and scatter seed:

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I add millet and such to the seed offerings and the outdoors becomes an open air aviary. I watch a new arrival, a flicker, a woodpecker with long beak. They like ants, but those critters have tunneled below frost line.

Back in farm days, I woke on the third floor to apparent construction site racket, just horrible pounding noise. Barely dawn, and in the back of the beyond, I peeked around the window. A flicker, just out of reach, busy drilling itself a nest opening in an old weatherboard!

I sent out a distress wail and a friend arrived with a longggg extension ladder and long leather gloves at oh-dark-thirty. He reached into the HOLE in the house wall and pulled out the flicker; put it in a big jar; nailed screen over the hole as a temporary measure. We released the bird in a forest far far away.

The flicker this morning is ground-hopping and picking up small seeds, beautiful bird with a black bib and speckles. Can spring be far away? Ask New England and Northern Europe!