For the love of birds

Any bird lovers out there? The change into the autumn season awakens the wonder of migratory birds on the wing once again, and with expectations we watch the sky for the first arrivals from the north.

At the same time, in this fiery fall of 2017, we watch the sky for smoke — the devilish byproduct of fire — and hope the waterfowl and other wanderers can endure the toxic atmosphere. Let the flames cease!

Of all the nature categories, birds have been one of the greatest attractions to me, a passion kindled during my Missouri boyhood days. Through the Missouri Department of Conservation, I became a Nature Knight, a program for kids, and was supplied with field guides, obtained a cheap monocular, and became obsessed with identifying a host of birds, as any bird watcher experiences when confronted with flocks of feathered friends.

When some of those vicious Midwestern storms pounded wind, lightning, and thunder into the night, I would lay in bed and wonder how those delicate bird beings could survive out there in the dark. I still think of the bird's crisis in extreme weather, or wildfires, 80 years later in Oroville.

Amazingly, next morning after a storm, the little sparrows, juncos, quail, and jays are there, going about their food-gathering ways like the beginning of a new day!

Prodded by that concern for resident winter birds in the Heartland, I would load my sled with lespedeza and grains after a big snow, and plow my way to a grove of eastern red cedar at the edge of Floyd's Timber. The cedar's low sprawling evergreen branches provided a shelter of sorts where I would lay out my offerings and hope no fox or weasel caught on. The adjoining woods were alive with squawking blue jay and jubilant cardinal and juncos that descended on my offerings.

Just imagine clutching a branch with thin legs as wind whips the woods furiously, and stinging rain — and sometimes hail — pelts the birds as if with a will to bring them down. You wonder if they feel fear, or worry about life itself.

Equally, what do the thicket birds do when flood or snow covers up their food supply, or a forest fire destroys their habitat? Shrubs such as buckbrush in California are very important shelters for ground birds, but its doubly tragic when the flame-monster destroys that benefit. There is doubling up on habitat, too, if they can escape on wings in time.

In the same vein, coral-berry brush, scattered weed patches, and fence rows were life savers for Missouri birds when winter weather raged.

There is always the presence of predators, even at night with the owl and fox on the prowl. Regardless of sympathy expressed by those who know birds and care, it is a dangerous jungle out there for songbird and shrew alike.

Resident birds endure the winter rather than migrate like the swallows and flycatchers, and as do the waterfowl in the Pacific Flyway. Who is there that cannot feel compassion for the goose or duck winging their way through the perilous sky southward toward an ice-free marsh?

"All day thy wings have fanned,/At that far height, the cold, thin atmosphere ..." said Bryant.

Of utmost concern, even pity, is the case of Anna hummingbirds that choose to remain in Oroville rather than migrate like most hummers. The flowers on which they depend are far fewer in winter, and I, as well as many others, keep sugar-water feeders out for them.