Birdies

The earliest bird begins tweeting shortly before 4 o'clock. The song dips and rises as if it were speaking Swedish. I'm half asleep and try to fit words to notes- "I'm a birdie, me"- but the song outpaces me and is more complicated than my brain can deal with so early in the morning. I'm hopeless at identifying bird-song. I know what a dove sounds like and a cuckoo (it's decades since I heard a cuckoo in the wild) but the high-pitched voices of the dawn chorus all sound the same to me. I'm hopelessly unmusical. 

The starlings are bringing their young'uns to our yard. Yesterday I saw a mother feeding a baby as big as herself. This morning she's brought it to the same place- the tree hung with fat-filled coconut shells- and abandoned it there, as if to say, "You've seen how it's done, now get on with it."