Here Today

       

      Yeah, we're here today, but our winter birds are leaving as they do every year about this time. We feed and watch birds out here on the branch all winter, looking forward in September, even, for northern species that won't arrive until around the beginning of archery season. The summer birds, the ones that arrive every year to feed out of the same feeders, arrive around May 5 in a journey that brings them all the way north from Central America.

       Earlier than that, almost exactly April 15 every year, the warblers (dozens of different species) arrive from even further south, the Caribbean, and also Central America, all part of a fantastic ticking ecological clock wound, maybe, at about the same time we were, who knows. Snakes? Lizards? Oh, yeah, almost exactly April 15 every year, about the time the turkeys are gobbling real well.

       It'd be hard for me to guess how many times I've been working a turkey to the call and nearly stepped on a snake, once a rattler out in the southwestern part of the state. It's interesting, too, my Paisano, my road runner, shows up about the 15th every year. A road runner, like Jurassic's velociraptor, will eat anything made of meat, mice and other birds included, but they particularly like reptiles. There are always a few lizards, and snakes, warming on the foundation rocks of my home in the summertime, when life is easy, right?

       The main winter bird in our yard, arriving down from the coniferous forests of Canada and Alaska right before the "big gun season", is the common junco, a bird so dull and drab as to be almost unnoticeable to any but a birding nut like me. A common name for them is "snow bird", so typically associated are they with the first snowfall of the year. I know the ducks and geese I hunt are in the country if the juncoes are.

        My old teaching partner at Page in Sand Springs, Jim Farrar, himself an avid birder, once described perfectly the coloration of juncoes one day when we were comparing birding notes between classes.

        "Oh, you mean those little grey and black birds that look like their bellies have been dipped in flour," he said. Perfect, Jim. That's the one. They look like their bellies have been dipped in flour. Exactly.

       Jim's not here today, a fine fellow that served his country in WWll as a radio operator and navigator aboard a B-17 making near daily bombing runs over Europe. He got shot down and spent nearly two years in a German POW camp, came home to an eventual quiet job as an electronics teacher at Page. He's gone now, but I never step to the picture window, look out into the yard at a seeming moving carpet of little gray and black birds dipped in flour that I don't think of him, the wisdom he brought home from all that violence, and his love of birds.

       So, sure the juncoes are pulling out, but they'll be back. We'll all be back. I guarantee it.

© Conrad Vollertsen 3-23-2020