Red-backed dark-eyed junco (J. h. dorsalis)
This line from Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Moth, The Mountains, The Rivers” is for me powerful medicine as I battle the distractions and the discouragement of this time.
The line continues, “Bow down to the earth as you feel how it actually is, that we—so clever, and ambitious, and selfish, and unrestrained—are one design of the moving, the vivacious many.”
For me, “the vivacious many” are the birds outside the window behind my desk, flitting to and fro from the birdbath and the two tube feeders filled with seeds. They are ordinary birds here in the southern Rockies; the one exotic, the piñon jay with its fierce crest, disappeared two years ago, about the time my neighbor from Chicago nailed up signs all over her property, “Beware of Bear” and then intimidated by the mere thought of our bear, poisoned by another neighbor, moved back to the city.
But I was writing about the birds at my feeder, never my birds, but the original inhabitants, along with the bears, of these mountains. I have many house finches, humble little birds, grey with a streak of red on the back; they seem to be most cooperative birds, perhaps because of being so ordinary looking, for they wait their turn on the perches at the feeder.
Then there are the juncos, less often seen, a little larger and a little more presumptuous, if I can call any bird presumptuous, claiming a right to one of the feeder perches. When a junco takes over, the finches that are waiting drop to the ground and pick up the seeds that fall from the feeder, “not worthy so much as to pick up the crumbs under thy table.”
I have only one western blue jay, a female by her dim colors, and a shy bird; she moves from branch to branch in the piñon from which my feeder hangs, watching attentively to see when I’ll go inside. She loves the bird bath, for drinking but also for bathing, hopping in with evident delight and fluttering her wings in the water. This is especially helpful to her in cold weather, getting rid of nits but also activating her cold weather defenses.
My other visitors are the ravens. Of course, these big glossy black birds don’t come to my feeders, but nearly every morning they perform a ballet for me, hopping from branch to branch in another big pine tree. One starts on the top branch, another takes up a position lower down, and the final two arrange themselves even lower; after showing off their design for a moment, they flock one by one into the air and sail away. I can almost hear them laughing.
I’m deluged as we all are with calls to march, demonstrate, write letters and call my legislators, all legitimate, all needed. But as we hurry and scurry about, the birds are still attending my feeder and the crows are performing their ballet in the sky.
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