Go Feed the Birds about It
I just wrote a letter to a friend about how everything is accumulating. People accumulating in the streets of Minneapolis. Violence accumulating between humans. Points-of-view accumulating. Facts and non-facts. Snow and ice. Last night before the snows arrived, I filled the bird feeders with seed, suet, and nuts, the motion detector light going on and off as I busied myself in the cold darkness of the night.
As I write this, the snow accumulates outside. Humans in the majority of the country are hunkering down in their well-stocked homes if they’re privileged enough. TVs on. Phones cradled in palms. Knitting needles scratching against yarn. Something simmering, warming, or burning. A book propped open. Glasses of wine. Mugs with cocoa residue on the bottoms. The ephemera of staying home in the winter.
My phone is outside, protected inside a glove propped up above the snow on an upside-down mixing bowl, recording bird song. Throughout the morning, we have stood at various windows watching the birds. Most of our yard birds appreciate the covered porch of our shed where they can find a surface not covered in snow to relieve their feet. Many birds keep their feet at a temperature just above freezing so that all the warmth can reside in the rest of their small bodies. We note that the birds have their coats on, meaning that their feathers are puffed up to create insulation.
As charming as it all is, the world of birds is violent and territorial.
But usually for good reason.
*
“I’m not smart enough to come up with solutions for how to fight this,” I said to my husband Brian over Bluetooth as I drove home from work. While talking with him, I took stock of my surroundings, how they look now, before the storm would arrive later in the night. The river, mostly covered in ice from the below-zero temperatures, was black mottled with white. “And the people smarter than me,” I said to my husband, “don’t seem to be doing anything besides posting online about how horrible things are.” I feel my voice crack. “And everyone is full of so much hate.”
969 miles away from Minneapolis, I imagined myself as a dot on a map of a huge country. Zooming in on the map in my mind, I became a dot in the lowlands of a precipice, contour lines surrounding me. Zooming in further, I was suddenly a moving dot, meandering along River Road in some small Pennsylvanian town, angry and helpless. Zooming in further, I was a human distraught in the driver’s seat with thoughts volleying between this country is fucking itself and I wonder how the animals are preparing themselves for the storm.
And then,
“Brian, thanks for being who you are.”
And then,
“I might go take a walk in the wetlands this evening, even though it will be getting dark when I get there.”
*
This morning started off with the juncos roving around the ground, pecking at a seed bell and helping themselves to invisible seeds that I didn’t realize were already on the ground. Their pecking at the snow-covered ground astounds me considering that there is a whole pie dish full of seeds and nuts on the covered porch behind them. White-throated Sparrows join in. A lone American Goldfinch in his dun yellow coat eats at a feeder. The passive, Mourning Dove, glorious in their soft lines and small head, always minds their own business and pecks at the pie dish smorgasbord. A Red-bellied Woodpecker covets the suet. Later in the morning, the Tufted Titmouse and the Downy Woodpeckers arrive. Come afternoon, the smell of peanuts finally draw in the Blue Jays who intimidate all the birds except the dove who continues to mind their own business near the peanuts. Then the European Starling arrives, as always looking awkward at the feeders that are too small for them to perch on. As I write this downstairs, my husband watches the birds from the bathroom upstairs after steaming it up from his shower. He reports the Jays’ antics and I report the Starling from the different window.
*
The reason I fed the birds in the dark is because I needed to go tell the birds about my heart. Some may remember the old idiom Go tell it to the bees where it was a tradition for beekeepers to go tell important news to the bees. To update the hive about life’s goings-on was to ensure the hive’s health. The night before the winter storm, I went to the wetlands during the dusky hours to tell the birds that humans are angry at one another. That masked humans are intimidating and even killing pretty good people in the streets.
When I parked, I saw my friend Frank’s car. Frank is an older, retired man who I met in these very wetlands where we were paired up to plant trees together. He is maybe one of the best trout-fishermen in the state. He makes his own spinners. Tall and very knowledgeable about plants and trees, we immediately bonded. When he isn’t spending an ungodly amount of time fishing the rivers and streams of Pennsylvania, he is a steward to the local wetlands, installing nesting boxes, removing invasive plants, and creating his signature brush piles. When navigating these wetlands, sometimes you’ll see a bright green walnut wedged in trees or on hard surfaces that I call dinner tables, where squirrels or chipmunks may pound the walnut until its rind opens. Over the past several years, I have learned a lot about flowers and phenology from him during our many walks together. When I saw his car, I figured that he must have been refilling the bird feeding station he built considering that the birds will be struggling to find food once the snows come. Sometimes we’ll both be in the wetlands and never see one another. Just two ships passing in the night.
The American Robins are usually among the first birds to talk to at these wetlands but they have all flown to the deep woods for the winter, abandoning their riverside abode in the valley. Now it was the small community of Eastern Bluebirds that flittered within the leafless brush that I talked to first. I saw only one of them very briefly before he took flight. I continued along the path, stopping now and then to just listen as the sun disappeared behind a nearby hillside. I dipped the bottom half of my face into my coat as it got colder. The evening was quiet, only the bluebirds, cardinals, and white-throated sparrow chirping in the gloaming. I arrived at the feeding station but only a few sparrow-shaped birds bounced from tangle to tangle. I couldn’t tell what species they were but I did tell them that an organization of humans called ICE murdered a nice, gentle-faced, bearded man in his mid-thirties who hikes and enjoys being outdoors.
“Someone like my husband,” I told them.
*
“The Red-bellied Woodpecker is back!” Brian yells from upstairs as I write this. It’s later in the day. The bigger birds arrived at the feeders not too long ago. I walk to the window and discover that all the peanuts are gone. Brian comes downstairs to watch the birds with me before he has to go back upstairs to work in his office. “It’s amazing how they’re so light that they can just walk on top of the snow without sinking,” he says.
“Yeah, they only leave the slightest trace of footprints,” I agree. Typically, Brian would be off on a Sunday but he’s a meteorologist and journalist during the biggest snowstorm in years. I fill a ceramic flower pot full of peanuts and take it outside, birds bursting into the sky around me. I place the flower pot on the floor of the covered porch, the snow already up to my calves.
The Blue Jays swoop in, raising their wings to intimidate the juncos and sparrows. They tuck peanuts into the gular pouches in their throats so that they can carry about three peanuts at once. The smaller birds bounce about in the vegetation around the house until the Blue Jays take off with their hoards. The jays fly to the other side of the house, towards our neighbors. We follow the Blue Jays, our warm, mood-lit house serving as a blind. We watch as the jays hide their peanuts in the snow beneath the lilac bush and oak tree.
“That’s where I’m going to be snow-blowing later,” Brian says. We chuckle at the futility of the jays hiding their peanuts where more snow will be piled. I can’t help but think of futility lately. How living in a country so large that the horrible things that are happening feel far away. How Brian and I flit about in our home and town much like the birds in their brushy territories. We get paid to sit at desks and do jobs that don’t fix the big problems. We stand in line at the grocery store to purchase leeks and coconut cream for soups. We empty the dishwasher. We look at birds through binoculars with 387 foot field view. I work on Saturdays when most protests happen. And to be honest—and I can be wrong—I feel like the protests are more for the protestors. I’m tired of being just another postcard or voicemail accumulating. I’m tired of being another reaction on the lawless, backwards internet. I’ve thrown money at this and that, but everything is so much bigger than me. Everything is so much bigger than a city of me. No matter how many of me explode into the air and take flight, it seems it will not be enough. I just leave a small trace of myself. I see privileged platform-folks tell their followers not to go to work. Don’t buy anything. Don’t do this or that. But that’s easy for them to say and all of it feels like peanuts being buried in the snow.
“Oh, that’s an interesting bird I’ve never seen before,” I say to Brian as we watch the jays bury their peanuts. Brian asks what I’m looking at. “In the distance, he’s walking in the snow. He seems to be carrying something,” I say objectively. “He has…a hat on his head,” I say, bewildered. “Oh wait…it’s just Stu.” Brian laughs.
Stu. Our homesteading neighbor who husbands chickens, ducks, turkeys, and geese. A man of all trades who walks up and down his land nearly every day in his overalls. A man who weaves baskets. A man who restores historical looms. A man who spins and cards wool. A man who showed up at our doorstep with a hand-carved soup spoon made from walnut. A man who gave me tobacco plants for my garden because “they grow pretty purple flowers.” A man who gives us cartons of eggs. A man who texts me because he has a feeling that I’d know where the hickory nuts are falling. A man who I gather hickory nuts for. A man who got me into dyeing yarn with goldenrod, pokeweed, and walnut. A man who fusses over and loves his beloved Collie, Ellie. A stray cat adopted Stu and follows Stu and Ellie everywhere, like a Disney cartoon. Stu taught me how to card wool and invites us out to dinner with his wonderful wife. We have all sat at each other’s fires in the evening with a few beers. Stu trusts us to look after his menagerie when he and his wife leave town. We are very lucky to have one another.
*
It was dark and incredibly cold when I got home from the wetlands. The bird feeders have yet to be filled as the storm was just hours away. I sliced open a new bag of black-oil sunflower seeds. One of the suet feeders still had some of Brian’s homemade suet in it. I filled the feeders under the motion-detecting light and then dragged my seed container to the darker part of the yard to fill another feeder. High, creamy clouds had already rolled in earlier in the day, preceding the storm. Looking up into the sky, I thought about all the beyond-my-understanding dynamics taking place up there that would lead to not just a day-long snow storm but a storm of dry, light, quickly-accumulating snow. It had always made sense to me that various cultures have so many names for snow.
“I have a new weather word for you,” Brian told me after I came back inside after putting out the bird food. “Warm nose.”
“Warm nose?”
“Yes. It’s when a wedge of warm air penetrates a snow storm, turning the snow into rain.” He went on to explain how the warm nose also looks like a nose when one looks at a Skew-T diagram, a diagram that depicts atmospheric data. “I know that you like your weather words,” he said, smiling.
*
“There’s a hawk in the mulberry tree!” Brian yells from his office that faces the expanse of our yard. Suddenly I am by his side peering out the window at a bird-shape darkness moving on the branch of our mulberry tree. We quickly go downstairs to possibly get a better view.
“It’s eating something!” I say, noting the bobbing of the hawk’s head. My binoculars appear in my hands like magic and I note the bespeckled breast of the bird. “It’s either a Cooper’s Hawk or that other hawk that looks like it,” I said, not remembering the other hawk species. I grab two nearby bird guides, frustrated that I can’t instantly find the pages I want.
“Don’t worry, it’s still there,” Brian says to me calmly. I finally find the right page.
“Or it’s a Sharp-shinned Hawk,” I say, showing the illustration to Brian. Although I’m in shorts, I put on my galoshes and a coat and grab my camera from the dining room table. I go outside where the snow is taller than my galoshes and starts pouring onto my feet. I forge a sneaky path in the snow around the house and behind the cedar tree. The hawk is still distracted by its meal. I learn later that hawks often starve to death in the winter. I still can only see his backside so I walk towards the mulberry tree, my eyes cast in the opposite direction. I imagine being the small, dead bird locked in the hawk’s talons. The carcass is a junco; I can see the black and white feathers. I can see its smallness. Moments ago they were likely alive and well at my bird feeders. I made my way around the tree, able to look directly look up at the hawk and photograph them. A mess of the reddest blood and dark feathers at their feet.
Reader, did I have you convinced? Because honestly, I’m just surmising that the dead bird is a junco. It’s only my best, educated guess that the small black and white prey is an innocent, sweet Dark Junco. I’m only surmising that the hawk is a Cooper’s Hawk by the sheer size, likelihood, and shape of their head.
I don’t really know anything for certain. But I’m going to confidently talk about it like I do. And sometimes people will believe me.
*
Later in the evening after feeding the birds, I was upstairs sitting on the spare bed crocheting a very large blanket and watching a YouTube video from a vlogger who was telling me to romanticize my daily tasks in life in order to make them more tolerable. I paused my crocheting, stopped the video, and scowled at her because I don’t want for things to be easier for me. I want for things to be easier for them. I heard Brian’s phone ring downstairs and he answered it. It was my dad. He calls Brian all the time, this time to ask about the weather. Brian always takes my dad’s calls on speaker phone because my dad talks incessantly so Brian prefers to do things hands-free while my dad goes on and on.
“What’s Sarah doing?” I heard my dad ask.
“Oh, she’s upstairs crocheting,” Brian responded.
I heard my dad laugh. “She’s really become, uh, domestic,” my dad said, which annoyed the hell out of me because any time that I tell him I’m doing something that I enjoy inside my house, he calls it domestic. Cooking unique meals, domestic. Watercoloring, domestic. Making dye from plants and dyeing yarn that I crochet into hats, domestic. Starting seeds and growing plants for the garden in my basement, domestic. Raising worms, domestic. Reading a book, domestic.
“Well…” I heard Brian say. “She did work all day, went for a walk when she came home, and was outside feeding the birds earlier.”
I felt my blood pressure lower. My dad can’t help that he has a limited understanding of how his daughter lives her life and makes her choices. He has a limited understanding of how his daughter feels because it’s difficult to talk to him because he’s dismissive sometimes or too caught up in his own mind. Very often he lacks an understanding of the umwelt of others. He is very likely on the spectrum which sometimes renders him unaware that he’s being hurtful or obtuse about certain matters. Deep down, I know he is just sensitive and would never hurt anyone. Sometimes he surprises me with his compassion. He can be very temperamental but he’s very smart. I understand, though, because my brain is wired differently too.
That’s fine. I’m not mad at him.
*
But maybe my dad is on to something. Maybe I should put the crochet hook down and get a license to carry. Maybe instead of closing a book at the end of a day, I close my hand into a fist. Maybe instead of going to work, walking in wetlands, and talking to birds, I should skip out of work, march in streets, and scream at horrible humans. But that’s not exactly who I am. Instead, I agree with Rumi who said “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” And although this still does not feel like enough, it has to be enough until I can be a part of something bigger.
All the wonderful men mentioned in this futile essay, except for my husband, likely voted for Donald Trump. Yet I will still bend down and examine a flower with Frank and he will still take off his galoshes so I can wear them to cross a flooded stream. We will still shoot the shit and have a beer with Stu around a fire and he will always lend us a helping hand if needed. And while cranky and stuck in his own thoughts, I know my father would love it if I called him every day like I feel I should. I know that if I am really mentally unwell, he would gladly come stay with me and play Phase 10 until he wins.
The internet is a world but it’s not the world. The world where we’re all just navigating a field and meeting one another, face to face. Right now, neighbors are helping each other dig out of a mess across many states. Neighbors are shoveling, taking another’s hand so the other doesn’t slip, bringing over food. But the jerks are still there too. We’re all looking at one another from behind our piles of snow. We’re waving at each other from behind the spray of our snowblowers. We shovel, haul, blow, and carry a mess that outweighs us exponentially.
At the end of the evening, I finish writing a post card to a friend. I tell her about the birds and then how sad I am. I tell her that I no longer want to feed the birds about it.