Put a bird on it

There's a lady in my neighborhood who writes lovely little pieces for the neighborhood newsletter, describing local nature and wildlife, especially birds.  She's a good, if slightly flowery, writer; and her knowledge of flora and fauna (again, especially birds) is pretty impressive.  When the newsletter arrives in my inbox, I almost always stop what I'm doing to read the latest about the neighborhood's animal residents.

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I grew up in the city. We lived in Philadelphia, in a working-class city neighborhood of brick-front rowhouses with stoops that provided a two-step buffer zone between the street and your living room.  Our whole lives depended on man-made infrastructure--the electrical grid and the sewer system and the narrow surface streets over which trucks rumbled, carrying food and supplies.  Dropped in the middle of the wilderness, the average 1970s inner-city Philadelphian would look around for a corner store and, failing to find one, would crouch under a tree and wait impatiently for a bus or a search-and-rescue team (all the time thinking to himself “What—not even a park bench?  What am I paying taxes for?”) I read a lot—the Little House books and the Anne of Green Gables series were favorites—and I couldn’t imagine how life was even possible under nineteenth-century conditions.  “What do you mean, Marilla made Anne a dress?  Made it out of what? Leaves?” I would think to myself.  I knew that Laura Ingalls and Anne Shirley didn’t have indoor plumbing, but I didn’t allow myself to think too hard about the implications of that particular lack.  It was too much to contemplate. 

My parents noticed that all of us were completely urbanized and unable to cope with nature in any form.  They’d make half-hearted attempts to get us into the wild, taking us to feed the ducks at Valley Green or forcing us all to walk “back the creek” on nice days, but no one was fooled.  A five-minute observation of my parents in any outdoor setting was enough to demonstrate that they weren’t any better prepared to cope with the stern demands of nature than we were. We were city people. That’s all there was to it. 

I've lived in suburban or beach towns for over 20 years now, so I've learned a bit.  Nature isn't quite as shrouded in mystery as it once was, but I probably still don't know quite as much as I should.  Our neighborhood was built by the Levitt company in the late 1960s, so we're lucky enough to be surrounded by tons of mature shade trees of many beautiful varieties, but I can't distinguish one from another.  We have lots of wildlife, too, but nothing exotic.  Deer, squirrels, rabbits, foxes, occasional raccoons or chipmunks--even I can tell them apart.

The birds, though, are a whole other thing.  I know pigeons from starlings; and I know robins from bluejays.  A duck couldn't fool me by claiming to be a goose.  I'm pretty sure that buzzard is just a synonym for vulture; and in any event, I know to stay the hell away from them.  But that's the extent of my knowledge of the avian world, and as far as I'm concerned, it's as much as I need.

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It's been pretty cold here.  If you're reading this in Minnesota or North Dakota, then go ahead and roll your eyes.  I know that this is nothing compared to where you live.  But a high temperature in the 20s is very cold where I live.  Yesterday, it was no more than 15 degrees outside when I heard a bird singing, chirpy and cheerful, right outside my bedroom window.  I'd been up for some time already, so I wasn't annoyed with the bird, just puzzled.  Who are you, little bird, I wondered; and why on earth haven't you flown south yet? Aren't you all supposed to fly south?

Or maybe it was a cardinal, I thought, not knowing for sure whether or not cardinals actually sing.  My limited knowledge of cardinals was gained from viewing painted ceramic plates and mugs and salt and pepper shakers that depict snowy nature scenes, always populated by a lone cardinal.  It just occurred to me as I heard the birdsong: Do cardinals really like cold weather, or do bad artists just like to paint them against snow and pine trees, for Christmas-y contrast? White, green, and red--what could be more wintery and holidayish?

I'm a curious person, usually.  If I run across an unfamiliar word, I look it up.  When kids ask questions to which I don't have good answers, I do some research.  But it never (and I mean never) occurs to me to take a picture of an unfamiliar shrub and then try to find out what kind of shrub it might be.  I know that there are hundreds (probably thousands) of varieties of birds, and although I've always liked birds, I've never been inspired to try to learn all of their names and particular physical characteristics.  They all have wings; most of them fly.  That's enough knowledge for me.

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Still. Chirpy birdsong on an Arctic winter day? (Shut up, Alaska and Michigan.) I couldn't see the bird, so I asked Google if cardinals sing, and as it turns out, they do.  And their song sounds very much like the song that I heard outside my icy-cold window.  

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And that's likely as far as my nature study will go.  I have limited brain capacity. If I'm going to maintain my wide renown for being an endless fount of useless historical, cultural, and entertainment trivia; an ironclad authority on punctuation, and an outstanding speller, then I can't start using valuable brain cells on wildlife research.  Something has to give, you know?