Common Birds 67 - Northern Cardinal

Monday, March 11

Even though I wish for winter, spring still steals my heart. This morning is a stillness before the winds come, and birds fill the stillness with movement and song. I hear red-winged blackbirds overseeing the cattail marsh. I walk between two cardinals who whistle a call and response across the parking lot. One is hidden in the trees on the edge of the stream, but the other I can see clearly, red, brilliant red, against the deep blue, early-morning sky. Somewhere in the woods, a Carolina wren calls and calls. I stand directly beneath a titmouse as it cries Peter, Peter, Peter! It’s been a year since I’ve started writing about these birds in this place, and two years since my Mamaw, my mom’s mom, died. She loved the birds in her place, the hollows of Kentucky, defending martins from black snakes, building canopies over birdseed when the snows came, and filling her home with the loud red of cardinals. I hope she might be proud. 

On the trail, I run into a small, mixed flock: three or four chickadees, a nuthatch couple, and a golden-crowned kinglet. I watch them gather breakfast deliberately and at their ease. On the pond, a muskrat, my first of the year, ripples away. The small birds, nuthatches larger than chickadees larger than the tiny kinglet, move from branch to branch and trunk to trunk. The nuthatches head down head first, poking their bills beneath the bark. Chickadees land on the thinnest branches, curling up to inspect everything between their black feet. The kinglet flits and hovers before the ends of branchlets, looking for food, and only coming to rest closer to the trunk. I’d love to watch them all day, but there’s data to collect, and the birds have other trees to visit. So we go our own ways, hearing the cardinals calling, first one and then the other.