Words and Birds

I enjoy reading with birds around me.  A book in hand and a bird nearby make my day.  I love it when the shy birds come out after a noisy crowd of people has left the area and only I remain there.

At times, both reading and writing are troublesome for me.  I’ve always suspected that I have a mild form of dyslexia.  Words blur and resolve into their opposites; phrases stubbornly repeat but don’t settle into complete sentences; sometimes the stutter-stop action of words flickering on my brain but leading nowhere forces me to put books down altogether.  Writing is fraught with difficulty, too.  Organization is a perennial problem.  Sometimes my hands even type the wrong words, which always astonishes me.

A colleague of mine once masterfully intoned to me that he could read x number of words per minute and thus could calculate how long it would take him to complete a reading assignment.  Inwardly, my unruly mind boggled at this, atoms scattering like a cloud of starlings that had suddenly lost its trademark direction and cohesion.  Outwardly, I mustered the all-purpose (if vacuous) smile-and-nod.  How could he be so disciplined?  Did he really read at the same rate under any condition?  Even when I read what I call “study books” for my classes, my reading speed and trajectory vary wildly.  Who reads Annie Dillard at the same pace as a freshman textbook on argumentative structures?

X number of words per minute.  That phrase has caught in this sieve of a mind.  My reading pace is never constant.  The only constants are the presences of books and birds, and of time’s winged chariot hurrying on.  Most places I visit promise the possibility of seeing birds, sitting with them, and reading a book, even if I am inside a building and looking out.

The best times are when I sit until the birds grow comfortable with my presence.  I read on my patio, and they eat seed at the feeders or splash in the puddles left by the storms or pull fat worms from the lawn. 

On a farm, a nesting phoebe let me pull a lawn chair within spitting distance so that I could read while she incubated her eggs.  We both sat motionless, eyes turned toward each other, blinking in the nexus of our described spaces.

Perhaps reading with birds helps to calm the mind’s processing of words, and letters look less like moody winged seraphs taking off and more like clear signifiers winged with serifs.  Of course, reading is suspended when I meet the phoebe’s eye or watch a chickadee flitting in the bushes near where I sit. 

I go back and forth between book and bird.  Reading resumes when I spare the phoebe from my gaze or let the chickadee regard me as part of the patio.  Then they tolerate even the turn of pages or a shift in my position.

I both relish and distrust analogies about birds and reading, yet I often like to try them out.  In my own writing I worry that they will seem clever, as if I delight more in the analogy than the birds that prompted them or am using the birds for my own self-conscious enjoyment.

While I read, my mind flutters and skitters along like skirmishes of small birds along the shore of a pond, picking something up here and there, never for very long.  Occasionally, with a real page-turner, it kites along on one of those long skirling rides that the peregrine takes down the face of the sky.  Chain reading from one book to another echoes the way I train my binoculars trained on first this bird and then that at a slough teeming with mixed flocks during migration.  Books pile up on the floor around me, like the birds and their noisy entwined colloquy. 

 I long for the purposeful, light, and unerring maneuverability of a Cooper’s hawk, and wish to read down each last word in the order it was intended, much the way the raptor unflinchingly pursues the hapless finch through tangles and thickets.  I wish I could write as neatly, gracefully, and solidly as a hummingbird constructing her nest.  Lacking the efficiency and tidiness of either, I enjoy their proximity and, as is the wont of the human creature, fancy another's traits as my own.

Stealing the Wrens

I’ve wanted to steal the wrens from my neighbors for a long time. The elderly couple does not live next door anymore, but have moved away to be close to their children.  I am happy for their good fortune in family but sad for my loss of their presence.  I always coveted their wrens, the way they trilled from deep in the ivy hedge, or scolded from atop the rose trellis, or popped in and out of the little birdhouse attached to the garage while Ellen weeded her flower garden.  

The neighbors two doors down have had wrens, too, which jauntily preach from atop a swinging birdhouse that hung from a pole.

It was a student in my Ecocriticism class last fall who emboldened me to change my ways and hang birdhouses in my yard.  In deep winter, he brought to class a wood duck box that he had made as part of his final project.  From a dingy classroom in the frozen north, he anticipated spring and summer and was full of hope that a wood duck family would set up shop along his stretch of the Red River. 

I’d already taken steps toward making my yard friendly for birds.  I set out birdbaths and planted shrubs and trees where the previous owners had, perversely, taken them all out.  But I’d stopped short of putting out birdseed, because my neighborhood is overrun with cats, including a swanky-looking Siamese that everyone has nicknamed “Killer” even though his real name is “Buzz.”

After my student presented his wood duck box to the class, I picked up a wren box and placed it out to weather the lean days of winter.  The no-frills plain box swung in the harsh winter wind and held steady with a load of snow on its rooftop.  

Dreams of stealing the neighbor’s wrens motivated my mid-February purchase of an “eco-friendly” wren box from Jeffers Pet.  

And at the height of wren anticipation in mid-May I impulsively bought a deluxe wren “log cabin” with a fancy skeleton key perch from a vendor at a bird festival.  The trio of boxes hangs above the flower garden by the garage.

In late May the male wren appeared, his bell-bright warble a dead give-away to his elfin return.  He fussed and prattled from the overgrown shrub by the three-season porch.  I stuffed a decrepit wren box in the heart of the shrub and fastened it tight with a fuzzy green pipecleaner.  He didn’t like it. 

I went away for a week, convinced that I had failed to entice the wrens.  When I returned, I dropped my bags in the front hallway, opened the windows, and sank into the couch.  A steady spree of burbling and bubbling emanated from the yard, and a male wren was showing his mate the three nest boxes by the garage.  In and out of each box she went, the male chattering all the while from atop the shepherd’s crook. 

I don’t know if the wrens have positively selected one of my boxes or if my boxes are merely a few among many that the male has chosen for his lady to inspect.  The male struggled to get a large twig into the no-frills box yesterday, and a quick peek reveals quite a nest pad cushioning its cavity.  This morning the yard is filled with the wrens’ cascading watery notes.  That’s more than my student can say about his wood duck box.  Last I heard, his wood ducks were merely “in the vicinity,” but his class project sits empty.