The early light of dawn was filtering into the bedroom, when I heard that faint but distinctive pounding, as though someone were pounding with a tiny ball peen hammer. Ratta tatta tat-tat-tat. I knew immediately who it was.
“He’s baaaack…” I said softly to my wife, just barely awake beside me.
“My God, does he know what time it is?” she asked.
“Yep. It’s party time …” I responded. And rolled over to try to go back to sleep.
An hour later, the sharp drumming was still going on, intermittently. I grumbled and got up.
Actually, I was more happy than annoyed about the noise. It meant that for the third year in a row, our resident yellow-bellied sapsucker had found our wooden fence acceptable and was drumming out a message of love and territorial aggression to other woodpeckers within earshot.
As the coffee brewed, I looked out at our backyard fence. There he was, right under the shelter of the lilac bush, on exactly the same wooden board he had chosen last year and the year before. Eventually, he gave up and flew off. I wondered if his neck was tired.
Maybe he’s already found a mate and started a flock of little sapsuckers, maybe not. Ultimately, I don’t know how he’s doing in the romance department. It’s just one of the many pleasant little mysteries that the birds in my back yard bring to me.
I am not on a mountainside, or even a dirt road. I live only about three blocks from the Vermont State House and downtown Montpelier. But year-in, year-out, I see plenty of interesting birds, right in that little fenced-in quarter-acre. They keep me in touch with nature’s current events.
I have the usual allotment of robins and song sparrows, finches of various hues, a pair of cardinals and two tufted titmice.
The cardinal and titmice are really southern birds that have moved into our neighborhood over the last decade. Are they there because global climate change is making this northern part of the world warmer? Or because of the spread of suburbia and that widespread suburban pastime, feeding the birds through the winter? Another mystery.
Frankly, I probably won’t like the answer, whatever it might be. But I like the birds. The jaunty arrogance of the titmice, the lovely peach-colored patches under their wings, and the startling crimson of the cardinal are an unfailing treat, even on a drab late-winter day.
I always know spring has arrived when the great crested flycatcher shows up and begins shrieking from atop the various neighborhood trees. I like hearing him. His call is full of wildness, a reminder that the natural world still works – most of it, anyway.
Many birds that visit our backyard are common, but there have been surprises. One rainy May day, I looked out a second story window at the top of our crab-apple tree, and there, looking back at me, was a blackburnian warbler – amazing! This bright little warbler looked like he just had a can of orange paint dumped over his head, and his bright plumage seemed to glow from within. Last winter, a couple of white-winged crossbills – an uncommon boreal bird that sometimes wanders south in the long northern winters – showed up at my feeders. I heard them twittering in our nearby cedars for a day or so, and then they were gone.
And then there was the winter day I came home for lunch and witnessed one of nature’s primordial dramas. A small hawk – a fierce little sharp-shinned hawk – was busily tearing one of the hapless neighborhood starlings to bits. One life was ended; another was sustained.
Most of my backyard encounters are less dramatic, less bloody. A number of days ago, I watched a pair of catbirds methodically gather nesting material, sticks and bits of grass, from the lawn.
They weren’t rare birds, or even uncommon. But they were graceful, with their neat gray plumage, black caps and long tails. And interesting. I had been hearing the male singing his bubbly, scratchy song for a couple of weeks, and it made me happy – irrationally happy, given all that’s wrong with the world these days – to see them nipping around the back yard, finding what they needed, preparing to build their nest and raise babies.
Nature isn’t something exotic that lives apart from the lives we live. We are a part of it. And watching the birds that share my backyard allows me a first-hand look at the incredibly profound, powerful forces, right under our noses, that make our world go.