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

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

We have a mockingbird that runs through a repertoire of several bird songs and otherness -- including robins, cardinals, blue jays, house finches, seagulls, sirens, and car alarms. He sits atop the cross on Shiloh Baptist Church across the street. Every so often he leaps into the air and displays his white stripes so make sure all the other mockingbirds know this is *his* church.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Clever bird.

There's something round here that does a nifty impression of a car alarm, but it won't be a mocking bird; we don't have those round here(more's the pity).