A Winter Window

Winter sparrows on feeder. Thank you Carol T. for photo. 

The bitter cold snowy weather does not hinder the spirit of the tiny birds at the feeders outside my ‘art gecko’ studio window. In fact, they become my escape when my fingers get confused on the keyboard, and I need to s l o w  d o w n my typing.  Today the arrival of four Goldfinches grabbed my attention, and stayed long enough for me to add them to the annual Great Audubon Backyard Bird count.

Our home with large windows on the east and the west gives us the perfect opportunity to become curious bird watchers. In the past I might have said, look that’s a UBB, an unidentified brown bird and gone on with my daily routine.

Curiosity and time have changed our UBB habits to names and collective nouns like a trembling of finches. The easiest to learn were the wrens and juncos. The sparrows still defy my learning. My ear tells me it is a song sparrow, but which one is the song sparrow?

The most fun to watch in the spring are the doves. When they are mating they gurgle back and forth and then the male begins to chase the female by ducking his head and bobbing back and forth. They gurgle bobble and fly off together. But that is in the spring and now they are surviving by sitting in my feeder cuddling.

*The Ring-necked Dove is noticeable because of the half-ring on his neck. He is one of the largest of the doves, and when he puffs out in the winter he becomes twice as big. But I have decided that doves aren't that easy to truly identify.

Last Saturday Jack and I were mesmerized by a hawk sitting on our back corner patio. He was perched on top of a flower pot, about two feet off the ground with his back feathers facing us. To one side was a Holy bush and a Privet bush probably filled with chirping birds, and an open area where mice and other small varmints might run between bushes.  Most importantly to him, his backed faced the sun. During the two hours that I watched he preened himself and ignored the squirrels that raced by on the fence top. The most stunning moment came with the silly squirrel on the fence top that decided to puff up and swirl his tale, so that he looked twice his normal size. He must have been chattering but we couldn't hear it.  The bird ignored him. Two hours gave me time to study pictures online and in books that proved to me he was a Sharp-shinned Hawk. He never feasted on one of our birds during that time.

We call the birds "our" birds because they become frequent flyers in our yard, and give us a winter task to keep their feeders full, especially during Siberian Arctic cold fronts and snow. Two weeks ago a large bird

I think this is a Red-shouldered Hawk.

landed outside on our bare-armed Chaste tree. He puffed his chest and fluffed his feathers long enough for me to take a picture and eventually identify him as a Red-Shouldered Hawk. It is hard to keep still and watch these birds, as I'd rather squeal with delight.

Since the time I was a child and could identify the Killdeer, Red-winged Blackbird, Robin, Scissor-tail Flycatcher, and Northern Cardinal I wanted to know all of the birds, but didn't want to be a birder or study them. I just wanted to know their names. That didn't happen. What did happen is that they gave me stories to tell.  

The summer between seventh and eighth grade Alfred Hitchcock produced a movie that terrified me, The Birds, a Scary trailer . That summer Billy Fullerton and I were playing afternoon golf, and we laughed about seeing the movie and boasting that it didn't scare us. On hole number 8, a long par three that went north about 200 yards away from the safety of homes that lined the golf course behind us, we teed off, picked up our leather golf bags and walked down the slope, jumped across the stream of water, apparently startling  the birds nesting in the bushes. A cloud of Red-winged blackbirds swarmed us like in the movie. 

 

We screamed, dropped our golf bags and ran the long way to the clubhouse for safely. Our screams were heard before we arrived and a gathering of people came out to see the commotion. When we explained that the birds had attacked us the men laughed, the few mothers took pity on us. My dad walked us calmly into the golf shop and gave us each a bottle of pop to settle us down. Later, he took the golf cart out to get our clubs, and a cluster of Red-winged blackbirds flew after him. Ha!

In the days to come several of the golfing moms and dad, who had heard the story, saw fit to explain to Billy and me that when birds are nesting and they fear danger for the eggs or babies they become very aggressive. Lesson learned, but I still never crossed that tiny creek without checking out the birds in the bushes first. 

A group of Red-winged Blackbirds is called either a cloud, or a cluster of blackbirds.

Ironically, they are not called a "murder" of blackbirds.  That's just in the movies.