Watching Birds . . .

. . . Is Not Bird Watching

I’m not a birder. I probably couldn’t name a dozen species—you try it! I don’t walk with binoculars or write down what birds I’ve seen. I admire birdwatchers’ dedication and knowledge, and I esteem the honor system that seems to prevail (wouldn’t it be easy to fake sightings?), but I don’t have their kind of interest, and besides, the variety of birds commonly seen has greatly declined.

When I first left Manhattan, I needed to keep a bird book in the kitchen to identify all the birds that came to the feeder. Not anymore. Sparrow, blue jay, cardinal, sparrow, sparrow, sparrow.

Today, the best place for me to watch birds is just outside my study window, which overlooks the porch roof. I scatter seeds on the roof then retreat to my work. If I don’t put out seeds for a few days, blue jays swoop outside my window to remind me of my duties . . . or so I think (prove me wrong!).

When I open the window to toss out the seeds, the birds disappear, but within a few minutes, the roof is a scene. Doves, sparrows, chickadees, cardinals, sometimes a woodpecker, usually a squirrel. All eating in harmony. Sometimes a blue jay plunges down and scares off a sparrow, but the sparrow soon returns. There are often half a dozen birds above my laptop screen.

The birds are sensitive to my moves behind the closed window pane. If I sneeze, they fly away, and even sitting up straight can spook them. They don’t seem to mind my typing, but sometimes I find myself so distracted by them, it’s hard to hold onto my train of thought and finish the sentence.

Why is it so entertaining to watch them? Perhaps because they are in many ways like humans and in many ways different—and either way it’s interesting. They seem to follow a leader: waiting for a brave bird to be the first to feed, then flying down beside it in a minute or so when they see it’s safe. They are perpetually nervous: they take a seed then look around anxiously before taking another. Size matters: the chickadees defer to the doves. They all rise as one if I stand from my chair.

How lovely it is to see them fly! Who hasn’t wanted to fly, to be “free as a bird”? Perhaps we vicariously fly with a bird, whether it’s flitting from branch to branch or soaring over a bay before plunging into the water and emerging with a wriggling fish in its beak. What astonishing eyes and aim!

Watching birds bathe is also a treat. The stone birdbath provides them with drinking water, and usually they just drink. But if the sun is hot and they’re in the right mood, they step into the water and flap their wings for several seconds, and in that spray you can sometimes see rainbows.

Birds are the only wild things we commonly observe, and surely the only ones most of us get to see in a group. Recently, I noticed about fifty sea gulls, some white, some black, returning from their travels. They settled down haphazardly upon a pier. But they kept fluttering up and down, rearranging themselves. After a couple of minutes of this, they had sorted themselves out, so all the black birds were lined up together as well as all the white ones.

So it’s true: birds of a feather flock together!

Think of how many bird sayings there are! “A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.” “The early bird catches the worm.” “Kill two birds with one stone.” “As the crow flies.” “Like a duck to water.” Birds inhabit our language (“birdbrain”!) because they inhabit our lives, whether we live in the country, the suburbs, or the city. I note that the New York Historical Society will soon have an exhibit entirely devoted to Flaco, the eagle-owl who escaped from the Central Park Zoo and obsessed New Yorkers for over a year before he died.

Birds are the only wild creatures that are part of our everyday existence. So of course we like to watch them, even if we can identify only a few!

*

PS. I found I could actually name 44 bird species, even if I don’t know what some of them look like. (A few I must have read about; birds are part of our culture.) Let me know if you do better.