The Barn Swallow’s Flight
Whenever you feel that there is no joy in the world, you must go to a place with swallows. Few things are more euphoric than a swallow in flight. The sun flashes on their iridescent backs. They swoop and dive and wheel around in reckless arcs. Up close they fly nearly too fast for your eyes to track. In a group their motion overwhelms your vision like a Fourth of July finale.
Swallows catch insects from mid air with the acrobatics of a bat, but with much greater grace and speed. Their agility comes from the chef’s knife sharpness of their wings, the sleekness of their bodies, and from their forked tails that tilt and bank as a second pair of wings behind. Perhaps from swallow tails we can get some hint of how their four winged ancient cousins, the microraptors, would have flown.
Picture the scene. You have a young child, three or four, a sunny field, and paper. The child asks you to make a paper airplane. Not satisfied with gliding, he wants one that does tricks. So you fold a trick plane you remember from your own childhood afternoons, and fly it. The child asks you to throw it again and again, and every turn and crash makes him erupt in laughter. He cackles with glee at its headlong loops. You throw and fetch until your arm tires, and your elbow aches, as long as he is entertained, and so the day passes in delight. If you can imagine this scene, then you know something of the joy of swallows. If their designer had any regard for the effect their flight would have on human beings, then they exist to bring out the bit of that child that is still left in us.
The Mockingbird’s Song
The mockingbird’s song is all bravado. It is a victory march of a hidden game of king of the hill. The male mockingbird chooses the tallest, most prominent perch. He viciously attacks any other mockingbird who comes near until he is satisfied that the surroundings are cleared of all competitors. Then he belts at the top of his lungs every song he has ever heard.
To birds, his behavior must be the same as rolling coal or revving a Harley, the sort of obnoxious machismo that men of most species feel driven to when young and unmated. But to us, he fills a neighborhood with a whole flock’s worth of song. If you are to have one bird in your neighborhood, let it be a mockingbird, for it makes up for the lack of all the others. If you are rusty on identifying any of your neighborhood birds by call, he offers a pop quiz every morning, albeit with no answers and no grades.
If we were to rank all the suburban sounds, from best to worst, trucks near one end, children playing near the other, the mockingbird would be at the top. It is the anti-leafblower. To the motorcyclists who speed down my street at 3am full of the same spirit, I offer a compromise. Make your engine sound like a mockingbird, and I won’t call the police.
The Cardinal’s Color
In winter in the east you must be content to be a connoisseur of browns, the golden brown of frost covered grass and queen anne’s lace, the gray brown of oak and maple trunks, the dark green brown of isolated pines. Among these, a cardinal has the color of a tropical bird. It would be at home among heliconias and plumerias and flitting among waterfall rainbows, but it lives among tepid temperate forests. It stays through the winter as they fade from green to brown to white. It becomes the brightest color in the landscape, as out of place and eye-catching as Le Ballon Rouge. It is a wild Christmas ornament. A cardinal in the snow is the most beautiful thing a bird can be.
As brilliant as they are, we can only see half of their color. Cardinals are as bright in ultraviolet as they are in red, a color human eyes can’t see. Their true color is one for which we have no name, one that mixes UV and red the way fuchsia mixes red and blue. Birds however can see it as clearly as any other color. What fuchsia is to our eyes, “cardinal” is to birds.
Cardinal, goldfinch, and bluejay are the primary colors in their purest form. When a bird feeder attracts the trifecta it is like a calibration test pattern for your eyes. These are the brightest colors you need to see, all at once. Look there. Hold your breath. Now you know what your eyes can do, and what they are good for.
Anna’s Hummingbird’s Character
It is impossible to picture an angry hummingbird without chuckling. The incongruity of the life of the hummingbird with its appearance must be the largest in the animal kingdom. Hummingbirds fight brutally for their territory. They do this because they must frantically eat nearly every moment they are alive. One would not imagine such drama in the life of a tiny puff ball with a comically large beak whose squeaks are nearly too high pitched to hear.
Another hummingbird who strays will be chased off at the speed of a missile with a flurry of doppler shifted buzzes. The flowers he visits every day must be his, and his alone. The tiny dogfight happens too quickly for humans to understand. If they’re confronted with an adversary they cannot chase off, for instance, a person using the backyard that is rightfully theirs, they deploy their other weapon. They perch somewhere, wobble their purple throats, and squeak. This is not very effective. It sounds like the sucking kissing sound one would use to affectionately call a cat.
The Anna’s hummingbird who comes to my feeder is the duke of the yard and I am his king. I like to think that when he tolerates my approach and stays perched on the feeder while I observe him that it is a little nod of royal homage.
A world with and without birds
It is said that dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago, but this isn’t true. Dinosaurs remain so numerous, diverse, and beautiful that many people make a hobby out of just watching them and traveling to see them. But just barely. We came very close to not having birds at all. As near as we can tell, only three species of birds survived the Chicxulub asteroid impact, and all songbirds are descended from one of the three. One more death, and we would have only insect chirps to herald the morning. Two and we would lose all waterfowl, no softness of goose down or water off a duck’s back. Three and we would not believe in feathers at all.
They are a gift. Notice them.