Bird's Eye View

I spend an inordinate amount of time talking about, listening to people talking about and watching birds.  I work at a bird seed store...actually the best... a WBU store.  Great place to work for someone who loves nature.  I get to expound on nature and its wonders daily.  I help people who either are equally enthusiastic about birds and nature or who want to learn more about those subjects.  They are sitting ducks.....I love these kind of people...it is sooo much fun to help others start down that road ...helping them to learn to notice the subtle nuances of nature and more specifically to learn to love birds.

Now that winter has dropped some snow, we are all feeding 'our' birds regularly and some are taking great photos of birds.  A friend here in Ohio has the unique ability to be at the right place at the right time.  His photos are fantastic.  Then there are FB friends who share photos of cute little fluffy birds, majestic flying raptors, videos of crows sledding on a rooftop using a bagel...amazing photos that touches something deep inside me and makew me catch my breath in wonder. 

I have to admit that I am as big a sap as anyone over my birds.  I feed them daily, I whistle to the chickadees their chickadee, chick-a-dee-dee or 2 note song as I fill the feeder and from faraway 'my' chickadees return the notes. It is my way of telling them that the chow is on.  During the summer, the Titmice that live a 1/2 acre away on the back fence line have babies.  A normal thing for them to do and about the first of August at about dusk a great cacophony of noise will start amongst the bushes.  It rushes towards me in a rising up and down wave of peter, peters and chattering that sometimes sounds like what Titmice sing but just not quite right.  I know then that the teenage Titmice have graduated from their nests and in a big bunch are making their evening run to the feeder. They are cute, they are pint-sized, there are at least 8 of them and they arrive with an attitude.  Jittery and quick they jump around on the limbs of the Crab tree which holds the feeder.  The attending parents chastise them for their bad mealtime manners and show them that the feeder has good stuff in it and is not a big scary monster.  They do this by hopping onto it, taking 1 seed then hopping off, over and over again until in exasperation they fly off in a huff and I imagine that they are muttering to themselves..."silly kids, won't listen to me, won't listen to their grandpa, I don't know what to do with them...."  Its amazing how easy it is to project my feelings and thoughts onto them just by watching their body language.

Yet they are not human and it is to my detriment and all of ours to suppose that they think or feel like we do.  Yet watching the video of that crow slide down the roof on the bagel makes me wonder. Once while hiking with a fellow nature lover early in March at a Fen near my house, we happened upon a frog that was just a little bit confused.  It was sitting upon a bed of snow, alive but apparently stunned by the cold.  We wondered aloud at why it was out so early, laughing about how we didn't think that the early frog got the worm.  There was no doubt that this poor Pickerel Frog (hard to tell could be a Northern Leopard) was in a life or death situation.  But what a crazy thing to run into and to contemplate.  It just is so interesting and makes the day go by when life and nature doesn't fit neatly into the expected pattern and I am so happy when it doesn't!