The Big Yard: Notes from a Pajama Birdwatcher

Watching my grandchildren race garden snails this past weekend was like sliding 50 years into the past.

May 12, 2023

The wonder of snails.

I grew up with my pockets filled with wonders—bug-eyed toads from the garden, lizards and snakes from the woodshed, and slime-trailing gastropod hermaphrodites coiled inside their tawny shells. 

I was a free-range child before someone coined the word.  And I carried the wild home with me each evening. I filled my red Radio Flyer with water and minnows from the creek.  I raised baby quail hatched in an incubator I constructed from a Styrofoam ice chest and a light bulb.  I learned the names of birds. My bedroom was a menagerie of gurgling fish tanks and glowing terraria, containing—most of the time—rattlesnakes and boa constrictors, scorpions and tarantulas.  My mom dared not enter.  (Somewhere in the crawlspace beneath my childhood home lives a very large snake.)

These days my life is less contained—only one vivarium holds a few wood frogs and spadefoot toads I raised from tadpoles last summer.  (And when they sing in the evening it is the sound of my childhood.)  I still carry the wild inside, what leaves and twigs and exoskeletals that cling to me after immersing myself in the wild outside.

Snails still find their way into my pockets.

And when I look into the faces of my grandchildren, I see wonder.  The same wonder that wakes me at daybreak every morning to free-range with the birds from my porch.

The first of this morning’s new arrivals—#78 for May—an inquisitive Hermit Warbler.

#79 for May, the first Blue Grosbeak of the year arrives for the summer.

And #80 for the month, a Yellow-breasted Chat, a surprise rarity for the yard.

Eighty species and the month isn’t even halfway through! Thanks for following along! More to come…