Birdies

[poliphilo]

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."

Comments

[faunhaert.livejournal.com]

"too tooo hahahah!"
sounding like a mad machine gun
are cardinals,

"peter peter peter " are blue jays

usually i can ignore the birds,
its the cat woken up they the birds thinking its
feeding time jumping on top of my head
and nugying my hair is the hard one.

the starlings are here today too-
stripes with yellow pointy beaks.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I think it's the light that wakes me, not the birds. Once I've registered what time it is I go back to sleep.

There are no cardinals here. We have jays, but I don't think there are any in the immediate vicinity. Starlings are common.