Three Little Birds
Bird One
Julia said, “I think something’s wrapped around its leg,” and opened her fingers for me to see. In her hand a phoebe with a piece of string wrapped around its foot.
I clipped of the thread with the scissors on my multi-tool. It flew away. Can’t say it was happy. We were, though.
Bird Two
I took a break from writing my book. It was raining. I was restless. Took a peek out of the curtains and there it was, one of the birds on Roger Tory Peterson’s “A Field Guide to the Birds East of the Rockies”. The first rose crested grosbeak I’d ever seen.
A rare visitor to these parts, Peterson describes the bird as resembling the robin, “but mellower, given with more feeling (as if a Robin has taken voice lesson.)” Our rose crested grosbeak just sat there in the rain pecking at the cheap bird feed.
Bird Three
This one appeared on a white sheet of paper in Julia’s studio. She was writing a friend a letter and included this painting of the common blue jay.
Common but magnificent. Take another look.
Have a great weekend. Keep an eye out for the birds.
I have a bird story too! A juvenile European sparrow had been struggling to follow its parents around on the bushes and feeder in place on our balcony. Incessant begging, “shivering” its wings to get attention, food, anything, in that fraught time just after flying the nest. The parents kind of helped, while stocking up themselves. The youngster, awkward, stressed, clumsy, every bit the teen who knows that the big world awaits.
When I next passed by the window and peeked out, the youngster was floofed out on the balcony border, just chilling, precisely like a squirrel flattened out on a limb on a hot day. He looked like a fluffy chocolate chip cookie baking in the oven, with a tail and a beak! I laughed out loud…