A BIRD IN HAND

Bird Feeders at 65 Fairbanks Circle

 

When blogging becomes slogging because of a pain in the knee (that fragile connection between brain and leg!), daily activity slows down to bird watching from the sofa here in our Sewanee, TN retreat. It’s a meditative exercise, not unpleasant, but not very productive due to a strange malady known as a “torn meniscus” of the knee. This malady is usually caused by energetic, athletic activity, which is laughable in an on-the-brink of 86 year old, namely me. Only cortisone and the sight of birds calmed this blogger.

A full bird feeder is a yard attraction we acquired last year. So far, we’ve sighted cardinals, house finches, tufted titmice, flickers, chickadees, robins, nuthatches, goldfinches, towhees, and other feathered friends that have helped soothe an ailing knee with their acrobatic dives into the air beyond our big picture window in the living room. 

I am reminded of my essay in Their Adventurous Will about Caroline Dormon, a renowned Louisiana botanist whose love of birds inspired her lifelong bird watching near Briarwood, Louisiana. She often spoke of early bird watching in which she and her brother crawled out on limbs to peer in birds’ nests near her childhood home in Arcadia, Louisiana. After moving to Briarwood, she set up many feeding stations that she filled with chops for finches and cornbread for insect eaters! She also stuffed cornbread into flat rock crevices and made pencil snapshots of wrens, titmice, and nuthatches when they assumed different feeding attitudes. 

Miss Carrie’s chats in the Shreveport Times magazine led to her edition of Bird Talk, a favorite volume read by Louisiana naturalists during the 20th century. Many evenings at dusk for 50 years or more, Miss Carrie fed birds, hundreds of varieties that she said were as keen-minded as humans. She kept a display of birds’ nests on the back porch of her Briarwood cabin, and in tales of Apocrypha concerning her behavior, she recorded stories about birds plucking hair from her head to build birds’ nests. She also wore a large hat with nuts around the brim from which birds feasted.

“I wouldn’t think of living in a house so tightly closed that birds couldn’t fly in and out and squirrels frolic freely from outside to inside. That simply would not be living,” Miss Carrie related to her Louisiana author friend Lyle Saxon. 

I envision her sitting on my front porch (which faces the back yard) in the evenings, “keeping company with skunks and scorpions,” and “the kingdom come,” as a friend once said about this beloved botanist.

Photograph by Dr. Victoria I. Sullivan, a fellow Louisiana botanist