Those Flying Teddy Bears

“All that is round invites a caress,” writes Gaston Bachelard, and the chickadee is the embodiment of caressable roundness. With its big domed head, tiny bill, and widely-spaced eyes, he is the teddy bear of the avian world. Who can resist that baby-like charm? Grown men have been known to stand for hours, hoping that a chickadee will consent to pick a seed out of their outstretched hand. 

Everything about a chickadee--including his mating call: hey sweetie!--is sweet. I, along with every other pandemic prisoner depending for company and entertainment on the goings on at the feeder, am a sucker for that sweetness, so I feed them seeds and suet, and make sure that the bird bath stays unfrozen even in sub-zero weather. If only I could know every one of their tiny hearts’ desires, I would try to fulfill them, all in the hope that in return they would think of me as their friend. 

But last week I listened to a lecture by the ornithologist  David Hof , Ph.D. about the emotional lives of these birds, and got a shock. I’m sorry to say that chickadees are, by human standards, anything but sweet. In fact, you could say that a chickadee is a wolf in bird’s clothing, except that wolves are a lot nicer. 

I learned from Dr. Hof that chickadee society is as hierarchical as the most rigid caste system. Worse, all chickadee males outrank all females, with the lowliest male able to shoo even the alpha female away from the feeder, no matter that she is married to the alpha male. Like many birds, a male chickadee sings to keep other males out of his territory and away from his mate, but he does not apply the same standards to himself: if he covets his neighbor’s wife, he sneaks into his neighbor’s tree and has his way with her. 

I was not exactly shocked by this. I knew from watching endless nature documentaries that many animals, including the most endearing, form rigid hierarchies, fight over mates and territory, and commit adultery. A lustful nature is not necessarily incompatible with sweetness. But my remaining illusions were shattered when Dr. Hof related that, after spending hundreds of hours capturing, banding, and observing a tribe of chickadees, he had found one in the act of murdering a rival-- a brutal attack in which the beta bird of the flock went on pecking savagely at the alpha long after the latter had expired (the widow fluttered off, but I shudder to think of the marriage that she was later forced to endure). 

It’s not fair, I realize, to hold chickadees to higher standards than other birds. Among eagles, the biggest chick in the nest usually kills one or more of its brethren, and female eagles have been known to kill their mates. But eagles look like frowning, angry old men, with their flat heads, deep-set eyes, and enormous, downward curving beaks, so we are not surprised to hear of eagle cruelty. But the cruelty of chickadees feels like a betrayal, their fluffy adorableness a feint designed to take advantage of our good nature. 

Of course, the chickadees can’t help it, anymore than the male lion can help killing his rival’s cubs when he takes over a pride, or the stags can help giving each other concussions in their attempts to sire the next generation of fawns. Wolves are merciless towards strange wolves who wander into their territory. Chimpanzees bicker for dominance, and kill individuals from other groups. 

But chimpanzees, wolves, stags, lions, and chickadees are nothing more than furry or feathered envelopes engineered to protect the real culprits: the implacable genes that will stop at nothing to keep themselves going. As Darwin proved, the individual is expendable; it’s the species that counts. Which, when I think about it, is beyond depressing, but at least it makes it possible for me to look more charitably on the chickadee, and find it in my heart to forgive him.

 

Chickadees in Stick Season

Between leaf season and snow season comes what Vermonters call stick season, when the landscape is reduced to endless vistas of bare trunks and branches, all in shades of gray. The skies are mostly gray, too, as are the squirrels and the rabbits. The chipmunks in their little orange coats would add some color, but they disappeared weeks ago into their hygge holes. 

The birds that, like me, scorn to flee Vermont winters for places like Florida, also wear basic gray, enhanced with bits of white, black, and slate blue. The only spot of bright color outside my window is the red dot on the back of the head of the hairy woodpecker, and on his smaller cousin, the downy. 

I’ve been watching chickadees feed, and worrying about how they keep body and soul together. They swoop to the feeder, pick up a single sunflower seed, and dash off to a tree that, in chickadee terms, is the equivalent of a hundred miles away. There, clamping the seed onto the branch with their claws, they attack it with the force of a miniature jackhammer. When they are done with that seed, they shoot back to the feeder, get another seed, zoom to a distant perch, and repeat the process. 

How many calories are in a single sunflower seed--two? And how many calories does a chickadee use in those mad dashes to and from the feeder, plus all that hammering to break the shell? If I had to travel as far and work as hard for every morsel of food I would be a living skeleton—or more likely a dead one. 

(Nuthatches, I’m told, can’t grasp a seed with their feet, so instead they jam it into a crevice in the tree bark to hold it steady while they go at it with their beak.) 

I put a heater in the bird bath to keep it from freezing, and, after two years of ignoring it, the birds have fallen in love with it.  But again, as with feeding, drinking looks like more trouble than it’s worth. A chickadee lands on the edge of the bath, looks up for hawks and owls, looks down for snakes and cats, fluffs its feathers, peers right, then left. Takes a sip. Looks down, looks up, fluffs feathers, etc. Takes sip, then whooshes off. Again, how much water can that teensy beak hold? Three molecules? 

With the exception of certain squirrels, all the small critters outside my window seem to live with endless panic in their breasties. Like Robert Burns, who empathized so tenderly with the plight of a field mouse, I worry about what it must be like to live in a constant state of fear. Do the field mice and the titmice ever feel safe enough to relax? Or are they under constant stress, wondering when, if ever, it’s o.k. to venture out of their homes? 

Maybe the reason that I’m thinking so much about the stress levels of these tiny folk is that I, along with most of humanity, am also feeling endangered this autumn. Like the chickadees and their fellows, I think twice before leaving my place of safety, save my outings for food shopping, and don’t congregate in flocks. Peering nervously through my mask-fogged glasses as I push my cart down the aisle, I keep to myself, alert to invisible dangers. I do not linger at the checkout counter, but dash back to the house with my little bag of sustenance, there to eat in safety. 

I remember from Catholic school that reassuring phrase about God (Goddess/Ground of Being/The Universe) being somehow aware, and caring, about every sparrow (chickadee/nuthatch/titmouse) that falls. My hope in this bleak season is that She or He is mindful of those little birds, and of me and mine as well.

 

Rilke To The Rescue

Some days the most exciting thing that happens around here is that a chickadee takes a bath. A bathing chickadee is a cheerful sight. After checking carefully for owls and hawks, he wades into the birdbath and does a kind of shimmy, dipping his head, fluffing his feathers, slapping his wings, and sending up sprays of shiny droplets. 

Other than that, there’s not much going on, so it’s not surprising that many of us are treating this period of seclusion as a time set apart—a pause, a break during which the clock stops ticking. A time in detention, or in suspended animation, or in hibernation. A chunk of life held between parentheses that will melt away when things get better and we go back to normal.

 I remember my two pregnancies, when my entire being was focused on the resolution of that exceptional state, and daily events seemed not to matter as, like an accomplished meditator, I turned my focus over and over to the coming baby. But those two nine-month waits were joyous times, unlike the last nine months, during which I’ve often felt that, like Rosemary, the season was pregnant with the devil.

 Yet every day spent in this waiting is subtracted from the number of days that remain in my one and only passage through this world. I am like the bird that flies out of the darkness of nonbeing into a great lighted hall, and heads straight towards the window that is open to the darkness on the other side. My wings are beating faster; the window into the waiting night is getting closer; and the goings-on inside the hall grow more perilous by the moment. Will everything explode before I’ve gone?

 I’ve been waiting for the explosion since 2016. Surely, I’ve been saying along with millions of others, this cannot go on. It will not last. Things will go back to the imperfect but tolerable way they used to be. So let’s hold our breath and take a nap and think of something else. Something positive. Let us smile though our heart is breaking, because surely the sun will come out again, tomorrow.

 And then the universe, or the Goddess, or the Holy Spirit flung this at me, from Rilke:

 …How we squander our hours of pain.

How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration

to see if they have an end. Though they are really

seasons of us,

our winter-enduring foliage, ponds, meadows, our inborn landscape,

where birds and reed-dwelling creatures are at home.* 

Winter is coming, in more ways than one, and it would be a waste to spend it hankering for spring.  Instead, let us find refuge in our inborn landscape, and feel at home.

 *The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Random House, 1982).

 

Hermits

The hermit thrush alone is a good reason to live in Vermont.  All by himself, this little brown bird with the speckled breast makes up for the cold, dark winters, the messy mud seasons, and the spotty wi-fi coverage.

He comes by his name honestly. He declines to visit feeders, but stays hidden in the woods where, during the nesting season, he decants a pure, cool, silvery rill of sound. I live too much in my head to notice a lot of what Nature, like a street vendor setting out her wares, puts out for my delight. I can pass a lilac in full splendor with barely a glance, but the song of the hermit thrush stops me in my tracks. When he sings, I have to stand and hear him to the end, or I would feel like I was walking out in the middle of a recital.

Although he shies from applause, there is nothing timid or self deprecating about his performance: he sings with the aplomb of a seasoned performer. I wonder what a young hermit’s first song is like--is the timing off, are there false notes, or does it emerge from him as faultless and elegant as that of his father in his prime? As I have never heard a thrush miss a note, I suspect that they are all born musical prodigies.

This has been a good summer for hermits. The thrushes sing late into the morning, take a short break, and resume well before the sun goes down. The virus-imposed stillness in my life has made it easier for me to pay attention. At sunrise and sunset I come out of my own hermitage and listen to the invisible singer pour out his melody from the shelter of the woods.

Whenever I hear the thrush, my grasping, non-Zen self immediately pleads “don’t stop. Keep going. Encore!” And I waste the last clear perfect notes thinking that  the solstice is already behind us, and all too soon he will head south, and the woods will return to silence. But isn’t the very fact that he’s not around all year, that he shuns my feeders, that he stays hidden in his woodland cloister what makes him so precious? If I heard him in all seasons, would I still listen?

From all indications, the coming winter will be an especially dark one. Like the chipmunks, I will retreat from porch and yard and go to earth in my cottage, to sleep and snack and endure as best I can. I will be grateful for every cheeping titmouse and chickadee that visits my feeder while I await the little brown singer’s return. I will think of him scratching for insects in the leaf litter of some southern wood, but saving his song for the love season in Vermont, and for his fellow hermit, me.

Sister Squirrel

As with most people who feed the birds, my relationship with the gray squirrel oscillates between grudging tolerance and rodenticidal rage. There is no lack of stories about the squirrel's diabolical cleverness in getting at food intended for the birds, so I won't bore you with mine. I'll simply say that when one of these plump uninvited guests goes anywhere near my bird feeders, I grit my teeth in aggravation.

Yet it wasn't always like this. When I first lived in an American suburb, I found the squirrels adorable, with their slanted eyes, monkey-like hands, and those cloud-colored tails that morphed into a question mark the minute they sat still. I thought they were charming and exotic, and I couldn't understand why so many people disliked them.

Now I do. I've been feeding birds and fighting squirrels for longer than we've been at war with Afghanistan, with mixed results. I've been wondering lately if it might not be time to change my attitude. Life's too short for hatred and strife.

The story of Saint Francis and the wolf of Gubbio comes to mind. There lived in the forests around Gubbio a fierce wolf who killed sheep, shepherds, and any citizen who ventured outside the city walls. One day Francis went in search of the wolf. He found him gnawing on a thigh bone and said, "Brother Wolf, why so much killing?"

"Winter is hard in the forest, Brother Francis," the wolf responded, "and I was hungry."

Francis made a deal with the wolf: if he promised never to harm livestock or people again, he would get the townspeople to feed him so that he would not go hungry. The wolf gave Francis his paw in agreement, and the people of Gubbio and their wolf lived in harmony ever after.

Like the wolf, my squirrels are hungry. Why should I begrudge them a few pounds of sunflower seeds, some measly suet cakes? Why not let them share the banquet that I so prodigally set out for the birds?

Maybe I'm afraid that, if I let the squirrels come to my feeders, more and more of them will arrive--huge invading caravans of squirrels that will drive the birds away and me into bankruptcy. Maybe I should build a wall around my feeders, a really high wall topped with barbed wire. Maybe, just to make sure, my husband and I should take turns standing guard with a pellet gun....

Or maybe I could go and stand beside the feeders and make a speech to the squirrels.

"Little gray Sisters," I would say, "welcome to my backyard. Here are my bird feeders. Here is my birdbath. You are welcome to all the water you can drink, and to the seeds that fall on the ground.

"I would prefer it if you didn't climb onto the feeders and dig out wasteful amounts of seed and suet, but I understand that some of you may not be able to resist the temptation. Whatever. The world is wide enough for your kind and mine and the titmice and chickadees, finches and woodpeckers.

"I will now go inside, take a deep breath, and try to see the beauty and innocence in your agility and determination. Pay no attention to the gray cat batting at you on the other side of the glass. He's never allowed outdoors."

Birds In Blizzard

While the nor'easter rages outside, I'm watching the birds at the feeder under the eaves. Long past the time when they usually retire to their roosts, they're flying in for a few last bits of energy to get them through the night. Titmice, their little crests down from the cold; feisty chickadees; and winter-dull goldfinches swoop in, perch, grab a single sunflower or nyger seed and fly off into the trees to feast in peace. You'd think that they would use way more energy in those flights than a single seed could supply, but the yard is not littered with bird corpses, so they must know what they're doing.

Slate-colored juncos--elegant little birds with deep-gray backs and wings, white bellies and yellow beaks--are ground feeders, gleaning what our obese squirrels have left of the seeds that drop from the seed containers. Just now, as the agile titmice dove at the feeders swaying in the gale, I saw a pathetic sight: a junco fluttered up from the ground towards the trove of sunflower fuel, fell short, fluttered down, then fluttered up again. What was he thinking? That is the last thing he should have been doing, wasting energy pursuing an impossible goal.

After watching five or six of these vain flutterings, I filled a plastic tub with sunflower seeds and flung them into the shrieking wind. "Those seeds will be covered up in no time," said my husband. As it happened, the wind was blowing against the direction in which I had thrown the seeds, and they stuck fast to the surface of the snow. Soon four, five, six juncos appeared, feeding greedily. For a few minutes even a female cardinal came by, her feathers ruffling in the gusts. Cardinals are scarce in these latitudes, so even I, who used to get a dozen at a time at my Maryland feeder, have taken to gasping with wonder when I see one. I hoped she would stay, but she didn't.

It's almost dusk now, and although the titmice, etc. have gone home, the juncos are still out there, in the midst of the weather hoopla, pecking the ground like hens. But one little clever one, wing feathers tending to brown, beak a paler yellow--a female--is hanging out in the one-inch-wide strip of bare ground right against the house. Except that that ground is not really bare, but covered in sunflower husks and seeds fallen days and even weeks ago. She's filling up on these, feeding contentedly next to the wall, away from the males battling the storm. Bon appetit, junquette. I have high hopes for you. May you live to fledge a nestful of babies in the spring.

The Warbler and the Septic Tank Guy

As a grace note for our potential house buyers, yesterday we had the septic tank drained.  The septic tank guy was dragging the heavy hose across our lawn, when he stopped by the front door, the one we hardly ever use.  "There's a bird nesting in that wreath," he said.  "Probably a warbler..."

I take a minimalist approach to Christmas decorations, but last winter I did buy a plain evergreen wreath for the front door.  A few days ago, I was walking up the driveway, scanning the house for defects, when I saw that the evergreen wreath had turned brown, and was sure to depress and deter anybody who came to see the house.  I decided to remove the wreath right away, and throw it into the dumpster (there is now a glorious rusty-green dumpster parked by the garage), but by the time I reached the house a million other urgencies--call the septic tank guy, the floor guy, the auction guy--had erased the wreath from my mind.

And that's a good thing, because in my abstracted mood I would have flung the wreath into the dumpster without noticing the tiny brown nest sitting amid the brown leaves.  But thanks to our alert  septic tank man, the future of the three diminutive pale-blue eggs is now assured.

I am willing to accept the septic tank man's tentative identification of the bird as a warbler.  (How many septic tank guys on the planet even know what a warbler is?  But in Vermont, he's probably not the only one.)  I've tried to get a look at the parent bird, but every time I come within ten yards of the nest he or she flies out with a loud grouse-like flutter.

Where security is concerned, this bird is a lot more uptight than the bluebird nesting in the back of the house, who hardly bothers to leave his perch when we walk out into the patio.  One thing he does leave, unfortunately, is great Pollock-like streaks of white poop on the newly painted barn-red wall.

So now we have a dismal brown wreath on the front door which cannot be touched until those eggs hatch and the (probable) warbler babies fledge.  And on the back wall we have bluebird poop which will continue to accumulate until the early- and late-season sets of bluebird nestlings take off.

If these birds don't leave us alone, this house will never sell.

Crazy Blue Flits By

I was staring meditatively out the upstairs bathroom window while brushing my teeth a few days ago.  It was snowing, as usual, and something slate-colored flashed among the flakes, followed by another slightly duller, slate-colored something.  When they alighted on the roof of their tiny nest box on the wall of the garage, I recognized my crazy bluebird and his patient wife.

For the last two years I watched the male arrive when the snow was still deep on the ground, and spend days on the treetops, yodeling to entice his mate to a nest box ridiculously close to our porch and clearly intended for wrens.  Then, for hours and days on end, while she was busy laying eggs, he would bang feet-first into the window despite our best efforts to dissuade him, for the sheer fun of driving the dog insane.

So now, in the middle of a February blizzard, here was the couple, like a pair of human "snowbirds" come to check that the pipes hadn't frozen in their Vermont summer residence.

I lay all this at the feet of the azure-winged, sunset-chested male, who, once an idea, no matter how foolish, lodges in his tiny brain, is unable to let it go.  His browner, duller, but more sensible wife would, if left to her devices, only show up in proper nest-building weather, when the sap is running and six-legged beings, the bluebirds' only diet, are starting to move around.  But in this bug-free, merciless season, what can two insectivores find to eat?

The nest-box must have been in good order, because I didn't see the pair again and concluded that, satisfied with their home inspection, they had flown back to Dixie.  But a couple of days ago, when I opened the hen-house door to let in a bit of sun before the next nor'easter hit, I heard the clear notes of my crazy bluebird, calling in vain for spring in the woods behind the house.

Bluebirds: The Final Chapter

Yesterday, between two thunderstorms, the baby bluebirds left the nest.

For the last couple of days they had been sticking their heads way out of the hole, exactly like cuckoos in a clock.  I tried take a picture, but every time they saw me come out with my camera they dove back inside, like their parents told them to:

There were five eggs in the clutch and I can see four birds clearly in the photo:  three eyes and somebody's back next to the opening.  I want to believe that there is a fifth one in that mass of plumage. The nest box faces west, and how they survived those 90F+ afternoons last week I can't imagine.

For a while I was also worried about the parents, who were bringing in bugs and carrying out poop for hours on end in the heat and the downpours.  And I was worried about the snake that lives in the flower bed beneath the box and had been waiting patiently for the moment of fledging.

But there was no helpless fluttering on the ground for these babies, who are a grayish brown and larger than I expected.  The minute they came out, they flew right across the yard and up into the trees.  Now I hear them calling in unison, in a sound that reminds me of sleigh bells, at the edge of the woods.

The successful rearing of this brood vindicates the father bluebird, who's been banging on our window for two straight summers and about whose mental faculties I had developed serious doubts.  But summer isn't even half over, and soon the bluebird pair will be starting all over again, courting, laying eggs, brooding, and then feeding, feeding, feeding.

I hope that when fall finally comes they'll take off for some island where they can lie in the sun and listen to the waves and have meals of bugs brought to them on a platter.  They deserve a rest.

Peace At Last Among The Birds

The war is over.  The bluebirds and the phoebes, unlike another bipedal species, have managed to keep things just this side of lethal.

The happy result is that a few days ago the phoebes' baby fledged and disappeared with his parents, whose squeaky-hinge cries now sound a new note of urgency:  that big baby hopping around in the underbrush needs round-the-clock feeding, protection from frogs, crows, snakes and foxes, and lessons in self-reliance.  Summer is half over, and the parents have eggs to lay and another brood to raise.

In the meantime, the bluebird eggs have hatched, though I can't tell how many.  A nestful of newly-hatched baby birds just looks like a mass of heaving protoplasm, and that's what I saw two days ago when I stood on a chair and peered into the nest box.  Their parents are on the wing, catching bugs for hours on end. To deliver them, the father bird perches on the entrance to the box and reaches his head in, but the mother goes all the way inside, then turns around and flies out.

In past summers the phoebes have used the same nest to raise their second brood.  This time, I don't know whether they'll choose to brave the wrath of the father bluebird and return to the nest on the downspout.

But until then, all is calm, all is bright.

Bluebirds Vs. Phoebes, Continued

A couple of weeks ago I wrote (http://mygreenvermont.blogspot.com/2013/06/bluebirds-vs-phoebes.html) about the battles between the phoebes and the bluebirds who were trying to raise families in close proximity to each other and within spitting distance (well, upward spitting distance) of our sun porch.

I told how the male bluebird would bang his feet and wings repeatedly on our window, scarcely a foot away from where the phoebes' nest perched on the downspout.  And whenever the phoebes tried to get to their nest, the bluebird would fly at them and scare them away.  With such persistent harassment, plus endless days of torrential rain, I didn't hold much hope for the phoebes.

Their nest was too high for us to look inside, but my husband rigged up an old side view mirror on a pole and we saw to our alarm that there were eggs in there.  As the guerrilla warfare and the rain continued, I thought surely the embryos had died.  I couldn't understand why the phoebes didn't cut their losses and find other ways to give meaning to their life.

Then, eating my lunch on the patio during a five-minute sunny spell the other day, I watched the phoebes catching bug after bug in mid-air, flying to the nest, and flying out again.

That had to mean that they were feeding somebody.

And sure enough, there he or she was, an adorable, gray-feathered, yellow-beaked baby, Nature's reward to the phoebes for their courage and perseverance.  Right now as I write the rain has let up, and the phoebes are in dinnertime mode, bringing bugs to their child every few seconds.  Do nestlings, I wonder, ever get indigestion?

Inspection of the bluebird nest box is a simpler matter, requiring only that I drag a patio chair over to the flower bed and, taking care not to crush the echinacea, stand on it and peer in the hole.  The last time I looked the nest contained five eggs, each the same intense blue as their father's wings.  What chemistry allows these birds to secrete that color as if they were cartridges filled with some divine ink?

I know that if I were commuting daily to a job and coming home at night to my own nestlings the politics of bird families would have less claim on my attention.  But now that my own nest is empty I find myself living vicariously, a least a little, through the birds, participating in Nature's great drama which, for all I can see, is every bit as compelling for bluebirds and phoebes as it once was for me.

War And Peace Among The Birds

How would you like to sit in my sun room one of these afternoons, gazing out into the verdant woods while the hens amble through the tall grass and the frogs sun themselves on the lily pads?

Trust me, you would not.

You would soon feel jumpy, anxious and stressed out, and you would beg to be led away from the big windows, away from the blows and noise of the war between the phoebes and the bluebirds.

A month ago the phoebes, who in past summers would rear their broods in the front porch, instead made their mud nest on the elbow of the downspout by the window of the sun room, about five feet from the wooden nest box that's attached to the wall of the garage.  They flitted merrily from the apple tree to the nest and back to the tree, catching bugs on the wing, wagging their tails in that phoebe way and singing their rusty-hinge phoebe song.

And then the bluebirds arrived.

This is the same pair that colonized the nest box last summer.  How do I know it's the same pair?  Because the male has the unfortunate habit of throwing himself feet first against our window, over and over, day in and day out.  After a series of bangs he flies to the nest box and tweets for his mate, then attacks the window again, purely, I've concluded, because he likes the percussive effect.  (I've written several posts on this in the past, so I won't describe again our many failures to discourage him.)

Now he's back, having flown all the way from Rio or perhaps Asuncion, to his favorite nest and his favorite window.  But he wasn't expecting to find the phoebes, and they, needless to say, don't like his incessant banging on the window just inches away from their nest.

The result is war.

It's really hard to watch the little brown phoebes perching on the apple tree, wanting to get back to their eggs.  But the blue maniac is there, flinging himself against the glass, and they hesitate.  I don't blame them.  When the male phoebe makes it all the way to the roof of the garage, his enemy flies at him, sky-blue feathers glinting cruelly in the sun, and scares him away.

One hot afternoon, as the temperature reached the 90s, the battle raged unabated, the combatants panting, beaks open wide, as they flew at each other and tumbled in the humid air.  I worried that they might fall dead of heart attacks.   If merely watching the commotion stressed me out, what was it doing to the birds themselves?

Of late, though, the phoebe seems to be spending more time on her eggs, and the bluebird's window battering is perhaps a tad less violent.  Could it be that the two pairs have resolved their differences, and the little phoebes and the baby bluebirds will have a safe and peaceful childhood?

This is such a hopeful thought, on so many levels.  After all, if birds can do it, maybe there's a chance for us.

Dear Bluebird: Please Go Away

After living cheek by jowl with you all last summer, I wasn't sure I wanted you back in the little nest house by our porch window.   But yesterday, seeing that splash of orange and blue at the top of the bare ash tree and hearing the familiar song did momentarily gladden my heart.

But only  momentarily.  Do you y'all birds have long memories?  Because we humans do.  I remember how thrilled I was when you first appeared around my house, and your wife  built a nest in the nest box.  And when, sometime later, I peeked in and three wobbly jack-in-the-box heads sprang up, tears of joy sprang into my eyes.

Your children grew shiny blue feathers and began casting eager looks at the outside world.  And then one day all five of you disappeared without a trace.  I had expected the fledgelings to hang around for a while, cheeping on the patio and flying up into low bushes, the way most baby birds do.  But instead they vanished overnight and left me wondering what catastrophe had occurred.

A few weeks later you and your wife came back, and she fixed up the nest and laid another clutch of eggs.  And that's when the trouble started.  When I heard the first loud bang on the porch window, I thought you had forgotten that the glass was there.  But that was followed by another bang, and another, and by much barking from Wolfie, who thought you were trying to effect an unlawful entry into our house.

I worried that you would give yourself brain trauma, but when I looked closely I saw your claw prints on the glass.  You weren't accidentally banging your head against the window.  You were purposely attacking it.  And you went on attacking it from morning til night, furiously and without respite, for the rest of the summer. 

We put yellow stickies all over the glass.  We hung large sheets of paper on the inside, then hung them on the outside.  Nothing worked.  You hit so hard that the glass shook.  And with every blow, Wolfie barked.

Then the weather cooled and the days grew short, and you and your spouse finally departed.  We breathed a sigh of relief.  When I went to clean out your house, there were three eggs inside.

When I saw you on that ash tree yesterday, I thought you might have turned over a new leaf.  But I was peeling carrots in the kitchen later on when I heard that familiar bang, followed by the familiar bark.  And there you were again, trying to break the window.
Have you never heard that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds? How about Einstein's definition of madness:  continuing to do something even if it doesn't work?  No?  You say you like flying at the window?

You're supposed to be the bluebird of happiness, not the bluebird of rage.  Please don't put us through another summer like the last.  That nest box is not your only housing option.  There is a nice dead tree with just the western exposure you favor at the bottom of the driveway, convenient to both grass and gravel.   I think you and your wife might be very happy there.

OCD Bluebird

At first I thought it was because she was playing hard to get, and it was breaking his heart, and that was why he was trying to break his head by crashing into our porch windows.  I'm talking about the father of the bluebird family that was hatched and reared in the nest box a few feet from our back porch, and disappeared one fine morning two weeks ago without leaving a forwarding address.

Now he's back, all blazing blue and orange and white, and obsessed with our window.  He flings himself at it, so that the glass, which is covered in dog slobber and nose prints at the bottom, now has bluebird foot and beak prints at the top.

For four days he's been hurling himself at the glass, then perching on the nest box and crying "Heee-re!  Heee-re!" to the heavens.  For a long time, there was no response, and I worried about how much head trauma a small bird could sustain.  Then Saturday morning, as I squatted on the hot patio for three hours, pulling up chamomile and crab grass and lemon verbena from between the slate slabs, I was rewarded.  Out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed the bluebird a distance away, following another bird.  He came back to the nest box, sang his "Heeee-re!" and banged into the window some more.  Then, as sweat poured into my eyes, I saw him perched on top of a pine tree, a respectful distance away from another, browner bird on the same tree. 

As I threw the last of the weeds to the hens, I saw the female perch on the gutter next to the next box.  She stuck her head into the hole, then flew off.  No wonder she was loath to commit.  I had seen what hard work it took to rear that first brood, bringing in bugs and taking out poop sacks round the clock.  To be fair, the male had done his part, but she was the one who'd laid the eggs, and sat on them.  Maybe, instead of raising a second batch of babies, she wanted to take the rest of the summer off.

But he didn't.  He was driven.  Bang!  he would go against the glass.  "Heeee-re!" he would cry piteously.  At one point I saw him shaking his wings as he sang, in imitation of a baby bird's plea for food.  I didn't think that reminding her of all the future meals to be dealt with was a productive romantic strategy.

While he was mostly present at the nest, she was mostly absent, and from sunup to sundown he called and threw himself against the glass.  Wolfie, the self-appointed protector of our lives and property, didn't like the banging on the window, and barked and growled whenever the bird approached.  I wondered if I would soon find a little blue cadaver among the echinacea beneath the nest.

Yesterday, surfeited with drama, we stood on a garden chair and peered into the nest box.  Not only had a new nest been built, but there were two M&M-blue eggs in it.  So she hadn't, after all, been deaf to his pleas.  Another brood was on the way.  But why, then, was he still hurling himself against the window?

I think that he just likes the percussive effect of wings and feet and beak on the glass.  He likes it so much, in fact, that he can't stop.  Even while his wife has given in, and is laying eggs, he has to hear that thwap-thwap-thwap.  It makes him sound big and powerful.  It accompanies his melody.  It started out by chance as he tried to fly through the window, and now it has become his reason for being, his obsession,  like hand-washing or hair-pulling.

On the other hand, perhaps he's just an artist.