I am beginning this post on January 20th, 2020, the day, this year, on which Martin Luther King Jr. is being honored. His actual date of birth was January 15th. I would like to open with part of a quote from a speech he made in 1967: “I’m talking about a strong, demanding love. For I have seen too much hate…on faces…to want to hate, myself, because every time I see it, I know that it does something to [our] faces and [our] personalities, and I say to myself that hate is too great a burden to bear. I have decided to love.”
May I live by this.
If you are with me at anytime and I am not doing so, please call me out on it.
This month, since the new year began, we have had a Cooper’s Hawk residing in and every so often calling out from the top reaches of the arbor vitae that divides our property from our neighbor’s. As a result, not too many local little birds have been visiting the feeders hanging, full and available in our back yard. It has been quite silent!! No squabbling sparrows, scolding blue jays, chattering titmice, nor bossy chickadees. No tittering goldfinches. No morning calling cardinals, nor mourning doves. No periodic honks from the downy woodpeckers. Not a single visiting mockingbird. No twittering carolina wrens. I have really missed them all. But this morning, as I ate my breakfast, many of the crowd came back! Sparrows aplenty, mr and ms cardinal, a family of goldfinches, boisterous blue jays, and a plucky carolina wren. Ahh, what a morning it is. 10 degrees farenheit, sun brilliant, bouncing rays off yesterday’s snowfall, feeders shivering under the landings, feedings, and flying offs of a crowd of songbirds. I love this. Now the year 2020 has begun!
I am guessing the Cooper’s hawk has gone for a visit elsewhere for a spell, and will be back. Hawk is as welcome as any other. Just, you know, give those little guys wiggle room each day, please. Thanks!
I am back from a noon tour of the back yard. A junco came by! This makes me happy, because over and above all the other rarely appearing avifauna, I’d spotted no juncos since this year and decade began, none, in fact, since before Christmas. I fear their absence, because their presence assures that winter will be here, and they arrived late this year, causing me trepidation, and they have been fewer in number, and then to be absent these three weeks. I worried had the Cooper’s found them particularly delectable, or had they departed for northern climes when January days soared to 60+ degrees farenheit? I do not have an answer for either conjecture, but I do have the delight of seeing one today, so winter is still here, and I, for one, am happy. Extinctions are occurring, may they slow down. May we slow down our consumption and let the earth’s resources rest, breathe, replenish.
whereIwonder&why 