Feed the Birds

The geese flying south is a sacred moment in our household. Our home on the prairie stands in an optimal space between river and cow ponds and fields. When we hear the geese passing overhead, the darkness falling, it is an occasion to leap from our chairs and race to the door to watch, to listen to them departing for southern lands. It is some kind of signal, some kind of passing of one season into another, and to witness this is our greatest desire. To a part of this change our chief ambition

Sometimes, they fly across the moon when it is full.

But after they are long departed on their journey south and we no longer hear the whistle of wind on their wings, it’s time to welcome another kind of bird back to our little windbreak. I call it little, but it has a history of seventy years or more and it is quiet a proper, grown up windbreak.

It has become an unmitigated pleasure of mine to feed the birds. I think it started long ago when I heard a familiar song and learned my first sparrow, and it only manifested itself very recently into my own version. When I moved the birdfeeder to the north side of the house to make the birds feel a bit more protected, and I could watch them, the song came alive for me, and suddenly I was my own little bird woman.

The birds who greet us now outside the dining room windows are smaller in size and I could fit them in my hand. House sparrows and song sparrows. Chipping sparrows and Dark-Eyed Juncos. This year there is a White-Crowned Chickadee that I have yet to get a picture of for he appears and disappears without any warning. But I am so pleased one or two have stopped by.

This is the bird of my childhood high in the Wyoming hills. They played on the porch railing dusted in snow and that is where I first learned to love the little birds, winter watching from the windows surrounded by pines.

There’s a woodpecker, too, whom I’ve heard multiple times but never seen at the feeder until this year.

Sweetest of all are the quiet gold finches, who have gone almost gray in the winter light. They are smaller than sparrows and more shy. Gold finches and Junco’s prefer to scratch about on the ground for the seeds the others have spilled in their hurrying, twitching little ways. But sometimes they come to the feeders to pick for their own.

And then Dad threw out some old chicken feed one fall, and when the first snows came we stood at windows and gaped because the pheasants had come, pecking at and scratching the snow for the feed underneath.

Our house suddenly became a Scottish hunting lodge with the appearance of pheasants. We have kept scratch grains on hand every since. I’ve yet to get a decent picture of them, they are so flighty themselves and never wander close enough to the house, running for cover at the slightest noise.

I sing that song every time I go out, or it’s humming in the back of my mind. The trees become St. Paul’s Cathedral and the window where I watch them is often teeming with sparrows, magpies, pheasants, rabbits, and sometimes deer.

Claude Monet said, “I wish I could paint the way a bird sings.”

And I’m here wishing I could do that, too, live my life the way a bird sings.

So I fill the feeders and spread the scratch grains for the rabbits and the pheasants, and it fills a void. It’s the stuff that makes you believe in good things again. It’s a pathway to seeing beauty, and beauty is the pathway to believing in a good God.

Listen to “Feed the Birds” because it’s beautiful and endearing.

Then the album I most recently discovered “The Lost Birds” which is an ode to birds that no longer exist, and the podcast which is the story behind the album.

I wanted to read and gather some book resources. But since this was rather a spur the moment decision, I have only a few suggestions for you.

Finally, take a look at Monet’s painting and tell me what you see . . .