Charming the birds from the trees

Hang a bird feeder and await adventure. — Katy Wrathhall/Creative Commons

''There was a pterodactyl in your yard! It was huge, and it made this terrible noise like you've never heard!"

So said the girlfriend of my tree surgeon as I arrived home from work one day when tree-trimming had been going on in my absence - always a suspenseful situation. But a pterodactyl? I think not.

As I struggled to frame a response to this wide-eyed report, I couldn't suppress a surge of pride and possession. Clearly, the great blue heron had been around again, working the stream for frogs and small fish. My great blue heron.

Great blues do lumber up into the air with a lot of fuss and effort, and make quite an outsized impression in flight with their 6-foot wingspans and their long, crooked necks. When startled, they can let loose a genuinely prehistoric croak, so I can't say the girlfriend had entirely missed the mark. But where she experienced surprise and maybe fear, I had a vicarious thrill of pure delight.

I'd seen great blues several times out back, tall and ever-so-elegant, picking their way with studied hesitation through ankle-deep water, intent on prey. I had associated these birds with coastal marshland and didn't at first realize that upland river bottom was another favorite haunt, and my stream was their kind of territory.

My good fortune. A solitary great blue is like an apparition - improbable and fantastic - and every time I spot one, I feel I am enjoying an unexpected boon, a moment of grace.

But then, I've had any number of encounters with great birding in places I've lived. I still feel grateful to the friend who gave me my first feeder so many years ago and encouraged me to keep it full and under surveillance. I can pass along this advice: If you become a backyard birdwatcher, you've set off on a great adventure.

There's suspense - you just never know what will show up, or when. There's drama - watch an immature hawk stalk a flock of mourning doves, and you'll know what I mean. There can be sex and violence, too.

I once saw a pair of courting flickers flying spirals around one another as they whizzed through a tightly packed woods at top speed. On another occasion a great "Bang!" on the roof turned out to be not a fallen tree limb, but the impact of a red-tailed hawk as it scored a direct hit on some hapless sparrow. I'm telling you, this stuff is better than TV.

Great blue heron, an impressive bird. — bobandcarol71661/CC

Few places have had better birds than the place I now live in rural exurbia. I don't have to create good habitat; I live in good bird country, with woods and stream, fields and tangled hedgerow, dense undergrowth and swaths of lawn. In the first three days after my feeders were discovered, I saw three birds I'd never laid eyes on before. How cool is that?

The most charming of these was the flock of quail that trooped in from the woods, traveling single-file like a pack of Cub Scouts. Down through the brush, up over the woodpile they came, catching my eye with their squat profiles in the gathering dusk. These are the guys who say "bob-white!" in the country dusk, but hardly ever show their faces.

Another time, I was addressing Christmas cards on my living room couch when I heard a chicken-like squawk from the other side of the French doors. I looked up and what did I see? A ring-necked pheasant flying in from nowhere to slink around the margins of the yard. Very handsome.

A great addition to my feeder array was a peculiar type of thistle dispenser that only goldfinches can use, since only they - and not the greedy house finches and siskins - can feed hanging upside-down from their toes. When I saw the first three goldfinches, I was thrilled; when I saw a dozen or more a few days later, I was really excited.

But one weekend, a number of flocks must have converged in my neighborhood. There were 35 . . . 50 . . . 75 goldfinches on the feeders, in the trees, on the ground; I stopped counting at 80. It was almost spooky the way they kept falling from the sky like actors in a miniaturized version of Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds." I hadn't known there were that many goldfinches in the world.

And then there was my biggest coup. Toward the end of two weeks of solid rain one early May, I caught from the corner of my eye a flash of purest sapphire blue. It had to be an indigo bunting, I said to myself; there's nothing else quite so blue in nature.

And no kidding - it was. I couldn't resist calling a birding friend to brag. He couldn't resist casually stopping by to check it out.

''Where's this so-called bunting?" he archly inquired. And I was able to squint over his shoulder into the yard and say, "Right there under the feeder, about two feet to the left of those three locust." Hey, this is truth-in-advertising. And this is triumphant one-upsmanship.

The following morning I woke up thinking about that indigo bunting, thinking how beautiful he was and what a rare treat it was to see him. I came down to make coffee and (wow!) there he was, back for more. How cool is that?

Start feeding the wild birds and you, too, will make new friends - with the shy woodpeckers inspecting the tree trunks inch by inch, with the talkative wrens who have so much to say, with cartoonish nuthatches that run headlong down the tree trunks as if on Velcro feet. With the cardinals and juncos, the grosbeaks and blue jays, the sparrows and doves that will become, in some small way, uniquely yours.