Posted Saturday morning, January 15, 2021.
Blue jays are sociable, neighborly birds, and that’s how I think of them, as my neighbors. The sparrows that flock in the bushes outside the front door are tenants who probably regard us as indifferent landlords whose best quality is our habit of minding our own business and leaving them alone to mind theirs. The catbirds think they own the place, the robins do too, but they make it a practice of looking in the window disapprovingly, as if we’re riff-raff who are wasting our lives and neglecting the property. Mockingbirds come around just to mock me. Cardinals are like those couples who live up the street who seem to be enjoying more pleasant lives and are younger and more attractive and more accomplished than you. Geese are like the large family at the other end of the block who's always arguing about everything at the tops of their voices. The woodpeckers are like the people who work in your building whose jobs are more interesting and who do them better and with more diligence and less complaint than you do yours. The only birds I think of as friends are the chickadees and nuthatches, but they don’t visit as much anymore. I wonder what I did to offend them.
Photo up top of a Black-capped Chickadee is courtesy of FotoRequest/Shutterstock, via the American Bird Conservancy. For real Chickadee info, follow the link to Remarkable Bird Brain at ABC. Maybe they’re just too smart to want to bother with the likes of me.
Don't take it personally. These local ebbs and flows are normal. Put out a suet feeder and I bet you'll eventually be seeing nuthatches. And woodpeckers.
Posted by: Mary Ellen | Sunday, January 17, 2021 at 07:22 AM