The Big Yard: Notes from a Pajama Birdwatcher
January 22, 2022
My neighbor Sara asks me where all the canyon wrens have gone. “I haven’t heard one in a year,” she says.
Still only 39 species for the Big Yard this year.
I miss the Gila woodpecker’s squeaky laughs from the sun-blazed oaks. The self-confident tweet-tweeting of the curve-billed thrashers with their soul-penetrating yellow eyes. The magical and haunting waterfall trill of the canyon wren, the first bird that sang to me when the wife and I moved into this rock-walled cottage in the woods a dozen years ago.
“Birds teach us about the fragility of life,” the wife says when I complain about the drought of species. “They are like balloons in the hand of a child,” she adds. “Inevitably, there will be weeping.”
Nest boxes and stone trickle fountains. Blackberries, amaranth, and seep monkeyflower. Sliced oranges, suet, thistle and black oil sunflower seeds. I build. I plant. I feed. I fill the statue fountain precisely to the rim each morning and pour out a bathing puddle on the flagstone. Increase the sugar concentration in the hummingbird feeder in winter. Scatter dried mealworms in the grass. In the end, it means nothing. I must resign myself to the vagaries of nature.
“In so many places, we are so busy playing at being stewards of the Earth,” writes Cal Flyn in her extraordinary and thoughtful book, Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-human Landscape, “deciding who gets to live and who gets to die.... We run the Earth as if it were one giant botanical garden to tend; passing judgment on species, playing God.”
The absence unstoppers a hole in my yard. In me. I fear the drawing of others into the vortex—black-chinned sparrows and lark buntings and western bluebirds. The foretelling of a coming silent spring after the dead of winter.
Hope so too. Not sure where I'm going to plant so many -- husband doesn't like me to water!!
A beautiful poignant reverie, Ken. We long for warmth and earlier sunlight to return. The birds do as well. Mourning doves are already on their nests at my home in Oro Valley, and CBTs are calling late into the evenings, even in the dark. Life is stirring.