Yet March brings the cruelty of delayed anticipation, of yearning for signs of new beginnings, of suspension between the end of one thing and the beginning of the next.
We’ve noticed some interesting things about the birds, like the sociability of the doves, the devotion of the cardinal pairs, and how the chickadees and tufted titmice pull a single seed through the mesh, then fly to a branch on a large maple tree behind the wire, where they tap the shell against the branch in order to eat the seed inside.
As we celebrate the season's bounty at our Thanksgiving table, our Self-Taught Gardener Lee Buttala is thinking about the alternative feast going on outdoors.
Thrushes are not particularly known for eating suet, or for coming to feeders of any kind, but it hung around for five days or so, even flying out from under the porch steps one day.
Her schooling in Switzerland was academic enough. Not only could she walk balancing a book on her head, she read the books she balanced. That was a prerequisite.
I realized that my solitary experience of birdwatching is genuine social engagement outside human community, a capacity that has been evolving between humans and other life forms for millennia.
A commotion of flapping colors, shapes and sizes approaches and persists as birds take turns digging into the high-energy food we provide, whether the most modest or lavish spread.
Soon the great bird backed down the post in pulses, turned its body and leaped onto a branch near the middle of the bush where it proceeded to feed on the red fruit.
I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t interested in birds. When I was eight, I started keeping a little journal of the birds I saw. I love how birds have an “otherness” emblematic of the natural world as a whole
