After my stint last week as Debbie Downer, I must say the weather for the last six days has made me thoroughly eat my words. I woke up tuesday to find a clear, warm sky above, and day by day since, the temperatures have crept up into the high sixties and, scarcely believable though it is, the low seventies. Yesterday was without doubt the finest day of this young year so far, and though rain and cloud-cover stand on the horizon, this week has been enough of a shot in the arm to see me through.
Oddly, one of the clearest signs of spring, symbolic of the coming seasons of plenty, have been an abundance of birds, of all sorts. Birds, for me, have always been something of an afterthought: the charisma and kinship of mammals have always drawn more of my attention. Yet increasingly, birds have turned from being the mere background noise of the animal world into the miraculous things they are. When was the lost time you stopped and thought about what it actually means to fly? Yeah, me neither.
If I'm speaking of birds, first perhaps I should talk about the chickens, who are doing quite well.
They are now just three weeks old, but already are growing at a rate that is hard to believe, doubling in size at least. I've given them the entire stall as their brooder room, and they've made good use of the space, trying out their fledgling wings in hopping, awkward flight. The birds have begun to molt, and like teenagers, they look rangy and thin, with long necks and oversize feet. Also like teenagers, they eat quantities of food that would put the pigs to shame. They chirp and preen and make short little bursts of running that always seem to take them right into one of their brooder-mates, bouncing off each other like little feathered projectiles. They pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and go right back to eating.
Outside the barn, the chickens' wild relatives have also turned up in greater numbers. The bluebirds seemed to be the first, darting about the pasture weeks ago. Starlings, obnoxious though they may be, were next, and then the chickadees, who have been here all along, made their presence known with constant calling in the trees by the house. A redwing blackbird came soaring over-head today, mourning doves fly to the newly filled bird-feeder in pairs, and robins have begun to skip about the yard in droves.
Other birds, less obvious, make their presence known as well, for good or bad. A cock pheasant, solitary holdover of the hunting season, managed to dodge a winter's worth of coyotes and hawks, and he came strutting down by the bridge and along the creek yesterday in all his iridescent finery as if the farm belonged to him. A duck was not so lucky. I found its remains in the high field yesterday morning while walking the dog, and though it was newly killed, there was little left to judge just what the bird had been. White feathers with large, hollow quills, a deep breastbone; one of the domestic ducks from a local farm must have been carried off in the night. Even more mysterious, I found an owl pellet today, an even slighter clue. What species the owl was, I've no idea. I've never heard one here and certainly never seen one, but there was the evidence none the less, filled with the tiny bones of the mice and voles who new the owl in a more intimate, more terrible way.
Other birds have spring in their veins as well. At least one woodcock has begun to nest in the scrub thicket in the center of the main field, getting up with a twitter and circling around every time the dog and I approach. Killdeer wheel and call back and forth together all day. At first there were three of them, but now only two seem to be around, a male and female, ready to nest when the grass gets taller.
Most amazingly, I happened to catch the red tails mating the other day. I was walking from my car to the barn and nearly missed it; one hawk alighted in a hickory tree beside the stream, nothing special here where the hawks make their home. But as I watched, the second hawk, the male, ghosted down to land with the first hawk, and in a rustle of feathers that was brief and without ceremony, they coupled, and then flew off to separate trees. Hmmm. Maybe they're on the something...
Everywhere, the farm is coming alive again. Green is slowly seeping back into the fields, almost unnoticeably, and the snow is gone from even the deepest gullies. The bees are coming and going from their hive once more, and along the roadsides daffodils are sprouting from the earth. And the birds, over-head and all around, are taking this opportunity to flaunt their disregard for the dull pull of the earth. The hunters, the lovers, the prey, and the survivors; they all take wing together under the same spring sun.
