The Backyard Bird Chronicles

But some Fox Sparrows are slate brown. So I blend a deep brown and warm gray, or I start with a base of gray and add warm brown. I try many browns and grays. I know that feathers are never one color. They contain reflections of colors. I can never get the color to be as beautiful and as deeply saturated as the bird’s plumage truly is.

The Pine Siskins are very messy eaters. I find all the finches are slobs. For every seed they eat, they reject four and toss them on the ground. I don’t know the reason for this wasteful behavior, but their sloppy spillage makes the juncos very happy. Food conveniently delivered to the ground.

Just three weeks ago, I was taking much pride in my yard’s popularity. Over thirty species of birds had been spending at least part of the fall and winter in my yard. I kept track of their IDs. The birds sang their many versions of courtship songs. As I walked up the front steps, I was serenaded by the orchestra of life. But then the birds abandone

perch. I tell the little titmice a cautionary tale about a little bird that sat out in the open for twenty minutes wailing for its mama to come back, and only the hawk heard its cry. I tell them to not break my heart.

Like some people, the finches want whatever other birds have, as if what others have is better than what they have.

I still see in my mind’s eye the goldfinch with its swollen eyes. Did it fly off with the others? Is it sitting alone on the branch? I imagine it making futile forays to this now empty spot it knows by the habit ingrained by a precise number of wingbeats. I see it in my mind sitting on a nearby branch, wet, starved, weakening until it falls to the

But when I returned from a two-week trip, they were absent. I refilled the feeders and sang their song. A lone female came a few times, but later she left whenever she saw me. Their temporary disappearance is puzzling.