Branches almost completely bare of leaves are now busy with bird life. Mourning doves sit silently shifting their proportionately huge (their heads are so weirdly small!) bodies around the maple tree. Cardinals line-up at the bird feeders and chickadees creep upside-down around the crab-apple tree at the end of our driveway, now heavy with fruit.
My neck cricks, watching all of the fluttering action on this bright Sunday morning walk with Tetley. We turned the clocks back an hour, another milepost for the season and technically, it’s still early and quiet (no leaf blowers) enough so I heard a distant line of geese, flying as only half a vector. Why did they fly in a straight line although there were enough of them to form a V?
Yesterday, half-a-dozen parrots decorated our oak tree. I rarely see them still – usually they flash by as noisy-green squawking mobs. But there they were – sitting, tropical green and magnificent throughout the oak’s dull branches, unusually quiet, they let out only the odd screech. I love to see these accidental-immigrants (the story goes that years ago there was a crate-escape from a shipment landing at La Guardia airport.) but don’t want them moving onto our property — which makes me sound like some kind of bird-bigot. It’s just that they make way too much noise and their nests can overwhelm and kill a tree. So Molly and I stood beneath them, doing our best screeching imitations of parrot-speak, to say: ‘move-on!’ before collapsing in hysterics.
I hope to see our neighborhood raptor soon. The branch in the neighboring wood where he sits in-watch or to digest some unfortunate, small creature, is visible again. In the summer we sometimes heard his distinctive high-pitch, plaintive scream, but rarely saw him for more than a few minutes, majestically floating by. While I am sad to be edging closer to winter, I love our new view of the birds.