The Big Yard: Notes for a Pajama Birdwatcher

January 28, 2022 

Nearing the end of the month and still only 39 kinds of birds for the Big Yard.  Looking back over the previous years, I count 14 missing species, most of them what I consider common “yard birds” like whiskered screech-owls or roadrunners or that gorgeous finch with the flaming head, the Mexican cardinal (pyrrhuloxia).  Or that other Mexican specialty, the junco with the amber eyes that casually walks through my yard like he owns the place.

This month it’s stalking better yards.

A Pyrrhuloxia from the winter of 2020.

I’m reading Inheritors of the Earth by the biologist Chris D. Thomas, who says we may be entering “a new biological world order” as species adapt to climate change.  “This is a story of gain as well as loss,” he writes, explaining that animals are migrating toward Earth’s poles at a rate equal to one mile each year as they respond to habitats that have “improved” for them.

That’s fine for birds, I think (imagining some crowded conditions for polar bears and penguins at opposite ends of the planet), but what about those creatures without wings?

Yet, as Emily Dickinson understood more than 160 years ago, hope is kindled with feathers.  On this 29 degree F. morning, with ice knives growing out of the fountain, a pair of Anna’s hummingbirds come to bathe.  Afterward, the female hovers at the clothesline, stuffing her bill with silky strands of lint.

Somewhere nearby she’s constructing a nest.