Common Birds III - Titmice

A blue jay is screaming. I can see no reason for this, so I’ll assume that the blue jay loves to scream, just as I love to aimlessly walk. Perhaps the pure purposelessness of the screaming is a great relief from the constant need to search for insects and seeds.

The blue jay is all I hear as I walk to the stream. The sun is low and bright. The wind is calm. The heron is at his further fishing spot, waiting, or maybe just enjoying the sun on his long blue feathers. I’ve often seen robins sunning themselves at dawn.

Through the parking lot that goes to the trailhead I start to hear more signs of life. Fish crows croak overhead, red-winged blackbirds trill in the cattails, and chickadees sing their two-toned song dee-too. The trail by the pond is half frozen, half sodden. The puddle is smaller than yesterday but I still have to jump across. Two female and one male hooded mergansers silently and deliberately put as much pond between them and me as possible. There's a thin film of ice. I hear a woodpecker pecking at a tree, find it with my eyes, and see it’s a hairy. Chickadees call out their name all around me. Happy nuthatch calls high in the canopy. I spot it and see its companion land on the same tree an instant later. Tufted titmice, small gray-backed, white-breasted birds with a cardinal-like tuft of head feathers, flit in and out of view. 

Where I used to live, in the valley of the St. Lawrence River in northern New York, there were almost no titmice. Unlike chickadees and nuthatches, the White, Green, and Adirondack Mountains halt their northerly advance. New York was my home for six years, and I came to love it, but I was there for grad school. I always knew I would leave. Titmice remind me that I’m here, now, along the Merrimack not the Raquette River. Here, I plan to put down roots.