vaneramos | Bird people

Rhamnus on Kingsmill Avenue

Today's photo evokes reminscence of October 30, 2003, with its vivid, dying colours and poignant afternoon light. By comparison nature today is grey but incipient.

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Bird people are a peculiar lot. I added someone to my friends list yesterday partly because she feeds the birds, a ritual service I miss. Two weeks ago I was pleased to find a house on Brockville Avenue, two blocks away, whose owners have hung or erected several feeders. That day the woods and river were silent except for the wind, yet this front yard was alive with colour and conversation. A bright cardinal charmed the day with his radiance. Several chickadees carried on their plaintive dialogue in the hedge. There were goldfinches, mostly in drab winter plumage, and a single nuthatch with his nasal clown call. I stood entranced.

I grew up watching birds at the feeder from our dining room window. My parents were both city folks, but they took to the country with passion. I don't know where Mom inherited her fascination with birds, but we always had field guides and binoculars on hand. I can remember her trying to point out birds in the bushes—I must have been three or four. A cardinal in fact.

"It's bright red, right there in the bottom branch of the birch."

But the harder I looked, the harder I failed to see it. My eyesight was fine, I just lacked the natural ability to pick small things out of a complicated texture of twigs. I inherited her delight though, and my pursuit of unusual bird species became even more obsessive.

After my daughter Marian was born, we moved from a little house in Guelph to a larger one in the country nearby. That was where I first started feeding birds seriously myself. Our dining room window overlooked a slope down to a small pond, where a tangle of shrubs provided excellent cover from which the birds could fly forays to the seeds and suet I set out.

On New Years Day in 1994 I looked out the window and there was a bird I knew did not belong at our feeder. I could tell by the shape that it was a thrush, but it's back was vivid blue with orange wingbars and underparts. I recognized it as a varied thrush, having seen one once in British Columbia, but knew they didn't normally range east of the Rockies. A storm must have brought it here. It settled happily at my feeder. In fact it spent the whole winter.

I contacted a naturalist at University of Guelph and he came out to confirm the sight. He asked whether we would object to other birdwatchers coming to see it. We did not. We only asked that they park on the road and walk up our driveway if they wanted, from which they could have a clear view of the feeder. Our varied thrush went on the rare bird hotline, which people could phone for unusual sighting and directions.

Before we knew it, birders started arriving in quiet attentive crowds. They maintained a respectful distance from our house, with binoculars fixed on our feeder. Some would set up scopes and cameras and stand in the cold for hours. They came from Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Quebec. As if to join the excitement, a pair of rusty blackbirds also settled in for the winter, not as unexpected as the thrush, but still an unusual sighting. All three stayed until March when the snow started to melt, then disappeared in search of other food. In my imagination, that thrush found its way home to the west coast.

The bird feeder on Brockville Avenue offers nothing so exotic. Just a few familiar species, vivid and spirited nevertheless. I stopped again this morning to check. The birds must have finished their coffee break; there were only three finches, one with a golden flushed breast to brighten the day.

I had stood there several minutes when a woman came to the window, coffee in hand, gawked at me and waved inquisitively. I waved back and gestured at the bird feeder. She gave a knowing nod, smiled, and turned away.