I put out a birdfeeder a year ago, and in this short space of a year, I have become a “bird person.” It’s not that I didn’t like birds earlier.
I talk about synchronistic encounters with hummingbirds in my book The Empath’s Journey. A few days ago, looking through my overextended bookshelves, I found a bunch of books I’d bought almost a decade ago on birdwatching.
But for a long time, I didn’t do much about it.
But something prompted me last year, and after a tiny Google search, I put out a birdfeeder with black oil sunflower seeds, the kind of seeds that a lot of birds apparently like.
And within 10 days, I had a flock of birds coming, and I was in business.
Some of my most delightful moments this past year were bird-related.
There was the time when I found a very bold finch clinging to the wall near my front door. It was when the feeder was almost empty, and it seemed like it came looking for me.
There was the moment when my husband and I went to a local park, and I noticed a new bird I had never seen before in my life. It looked like a crow, but had a longer tail and an iridescent sheen. It was a grackle!
There were those times when the squirrels started raiding the birdfeeder.
While that was annoying, I loved the squirrels themselves. One day, as I stepped outside, a little one did peekaboo with me from behind a tree. I can’t believe people dismissively think of squirrels as a kind of mice or rat (not that there’s anything wrong with mice or rats).
They are the most precocious, intelligent creatures. They are so resourceful.
Then, there was the moment when I felt a dappled moment of peace – in the middle of feeling utter chaos – the day we went on a picnic and sat in front of a lake where a black cormorant appeared and disappeared from beneath the water’s surface. A mystical bird that can dive deep into the water, and come back.
We went to this lake only thrice, but the last time, the cormorant was not there.
It was after World Migratory Bird day in May, and white specks were falling on the lake. I wondered if the cormorant had migrated, or had it just gone away to a different part of the park.
Then, there was the day when a pair of ducks somehow landed up in a little strip of green opposite our home. It’s a mallard, my husband said, which was a moment of delight when I realized he’d been listening along to all the bird-related YouTube videos I’d been watching.
There was also the fact that a little ecosystem seemed to have grown around us over the months.
Squirrels visited. Angry-bird-looking finches quarreled with each other. A wandering band of bushtits, so tiny I could cup them in my hand, set up a distinct chatter one summer afternoon. A pair of mourning doves seemed to have settled on the roof. In the afternoons, as I sat at the dining room table, I could hear them overhead.
And late last year, I saw a littler dove, which made me think they had a baby on our roof!
There were also poignant moments.
After reading about how hard it is for duck eggs to survive, for some reason, I felt a deep sadness when I looked at a family of ducks at the park. I should have felt happy at this miracle, at how amidst all the risk, life was blooming. And yet, I felt sad.
Or when I read that “in a single human lifetime, 2.9 billion breeding adult birds have been lost from the United States & Canada.”
How come I didn’t know that a year ago?
And what a terrible fact.
My husband and I rewatched the Avengers movies. And in the one in which Thanos has “disappeared” half of all life, the scene where there are no birds in the trees felt so sad, so personal.
What a horrible world it would be without birds.
I thought of my own grayness. I was putting out seeds for now, but I was a predator too. I judged the finches who fought like little bandits at the feeder, even though it was big enough to let several of them feeding at once. They were spoiling my Disney-esque idea of feeding birds.
But then, once the squirrels started raiding, I saw them sit a little forlornly in the surrounding trees. It doesn’t take that long for the pecking order to change.
They looked like innocent little birds then.
And as I learned about all these different birds congregating, I saw that there were multiple storylines. There was some of the “survival of the fittest” happening that some people talk about when talking about nature.
But there was also cooperation.
It turns out that local birds tell migrating birds – birds new to the area – the location of bird feeders and where water may be available.
Nature includes both jostling & shoving and moving together in unison.
And like the act of birdwatching itself, nature itself is plural. All sorts of things happen in it. Creation. Destruction. Beauty. Sadness.
I think it was when I embraced my own grayness that I could start birdwatching. I didn’t know whether birdwatching was totally a “good thing” or not. Possibly, the pros and cons even out.
But I do know that it was when I admitted this grayness, and the fact that I also felt a longing to connect with something deeper, to touch something real, that I let myself do it.
It makes me think of how frozen I can feel about my creativity in general, and taking any creative action.
If you write something you really think, if you put out the birdfeeder for your desire, it is scary. Because it’s a meeting with reality. It’s an experiment. You don’t want to be blamed for not knowing things you still don’t know, for unintended consequences.
There was a time when a Cooper’s hawk came visiting, and for a little bit, I had visions of having created easy access to more defenseless birds.
That, thankfully, did not happen.
When I read about it, it turns out nature has equipped small birds with great instincts. Many birds, for example, don’t create nests in the vicinity of feeders. (My mourning doves seem to be an exception).
To do something then, to take creative action, you are always moving in the direction of some uncertainty, some ambiguity, responding to things that are always changing. One day, a hawk comes by, reminding you that wildness is nearby. Another day, a dark-eyed junco, a sparrow with the most beautiful singing voice, opens the door to the delightful world of birdsong.
There is some responsibility involved, some receptivity, and some surrender.
And in the pregnant form of this living, there is the touching of the mystery, and of being touched by it, if only for a brief moment – when your mind is a muddle of old reactions and wounded feelings, and then a black cormorant dives into a lake and you feel a moment of peace that is maybe inside the lake, or maybe inside you.
Ritu Kaushal is the author of the book The Empath’s Journey and a Silver Medal Awardee at the Rex Awards, co-presented by the United Nations in India. Find more about Ritu HERE.
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