Common Birds 59 - Nuthatch
Wednesday, January 24
As soon as I step out of my office’s back door, a cloud of juncos, small black and white sparrows, flit from the juniper shrubs to the higher branches of the oak. Their charcoal tails flash with two white lines. The wet snow that fell overnight is melting and falling like rain.
On the trail, the snow tells me stories. Here a rabbit crossed and recrossed the footpath. Here a human took one of the secret trails down to the river’s bank, as he often does in the mornings. I follow the tiny hand prints of a raccoon as it went down to the edge of the frozen pond. The trail disappears there, so he must have climbed a tree, or I just don’t have any practice with this sort of thing. The snow has a memory, holding these passes I would never be able to notice otherwise. It makes me wish I had a nose or a trained eye which could read these travel stories when they’re more subtle. What would it be like to be an animal whose nose can smell the pase, glimpsing all these lives which are normally hidden from me. But my nose is just my nose and my sensitivity to smell barely extends beyond good and bad. I can’t even talk about smell without using ocular language. So, I will be content with the remembrance of the wet snow.
To my left, I hear a nuthatch call, a story I’m used to hearing, and I head over in its direction. I spot it high in a tree before it takes off towards the bridge over the cattail marsh. I can’t do too much with my nose, but not many animals have eyes like mine. I follow the nuthatch out of the woods, heading back into the parking lot. After crossing the twenty or so yards between the woods and the bridge, I come to a stop and wait. I love this. When I stand still, I fade away, letting the life around me slowly come to the fore. Juncos dot the brush to the right of the bridge, hopping from branch to ground back to branch. A cardinal chirps from the far side of the bridge, and I can just make out her rusty brown feathers. A blue jay sweeps silently past, then a second. The nuthatch emerges from behind a thick trunk, calls out, and climbs headfirst down the tree. Its mate swoops in from the woods, joining the first nuthatch on the rugged bark.
