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

 

 

MYSTERY OF THE DISAPPEARING BIRDS

Bird feeder at Fairbanks home

In my last blog, I wrote about birds disappearing from our yard and surrounding woods and wondered if their food had been poisoned by pesticides or herbicides, or if they had migrated early, or did they just not like the birdbath we'd filled with reverse osmosis water. They may not have liked the appearance of our new bird feeder, which resembles the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Yesterday afternoon we looked out the living room window at the bird feeder and, voila, we discovered an ominous reason for the sudden absence of birdlife (except for a few marauding crows). Atop the new bird feeder, wings folded neatly and looking like a polite statue of itself, was a Merlin falcon whose chief diet consists of small birds — sparrows, wrens, nuthatches, and titmice that once flocked to our yard, but which must have become prey for this large bird.

I’ve read that Merlins watch for prey from a perch, and what better perch than our tall bird feeder? However, he catches this prey in mid-air, flying at race track speed, and the poor smaller bird dies from sudden attack. What do raptors do with feathers and bill?

We watched him for a half hour or so until he flew into the woods where he’d probably found an abandoned crow’s nest, 10 - 50 feet above the ground. I was afraid to track him, having heard the story about a hawk attacking a friend when she walked down to her mailbox to get a better view of the bird.

We heard no bird calls as we watched, but later I thought I heard a loud cackle that this raptor often makes. The Merlin could probably team up with crows to make a raucous sonata, but crows regard themselves as creatures superior to most birds and mostly frequent the front yard where they chase squirrels into the tall hemlock. They seem to prefer food in freshly mown grass, rather than smaller birds.

In my readings, I discovered that Merlins also enjoy a good meal of snakes, rats, and bats so they couldn’t be all bad. However, I confess that I prefer the small bird population we'd enjoyed watching splash in the birdbath, and I’m considering dismantling the Merlin’s perch, the leaning bird feeder. Anyway, due to heavy rains, the birdseed has sprouted!

A further negative report about the Merlin: He’s become a threat to an endangered species of Plovers nesting around the Great Lakes. Also, he feeds upon my favorite insects, dragonflies. A statue of this favored insect was given to me by a deceased, cherished friend and sits on a table overlooking the backyard. I’m thinking of moving it away from the window in case Merlin decides to make a crash landing against the sometimes-cloudy panes while we’re away this winter.

Photography by Victoria I. Sullivan