“Cardinals! Cardinals! Cardinals!” I call out quietly but distinctly enough for my husband to hear me inside the house. He creeps slowly to the porch to admire the pair, laughing gently at my child-like enthusiasm. Until I moved to
Wrapped in a blanket on the porch glider, I watch fall creeping around the edges of late summer, threatening to send me back indoors for the winter. I’ve spent nearly two years here staring at the lake and I’ve done a lot less writing than I meant to, but my peace and joy have grown tenfold, and the writing I have done is much better.
This is not a wilderness lake and the sounds of internal combustion engines form rings around my thoughts many hours of the day. The retired men who worked for decades up north have not grasped the joy of simply being still. They must mow, trim, fertilize and sculpt their lawns until they look as perfect as a Marine colonel’s buzz-cut. Some days the continual humming annoys me but I try instead to be grateful for their reliable and constant activity which diverts the wildlife to our overgrown yard.
Word has gotten around that all are welcome here.
We didn’t do anything to create a place for the birds. It’s more what we didn’t do. Our grass usually needs cutting, the hedges are wild, and we lazily watch the abundance come to play and eat instead of weeding, gardening, and planting.
If my enthusiasm outweighs that of my nine-year-old friend, Olivia, it’s because she’s grown up with this colorful plumage surrounding her. Birds are brown or black in
Not long ago I was a city girl. Pigeons, starlings, crows, and robins are all I remember seeing, but I’m anxious to revisit
The names still baffle me. On one of our ritual walks my husband nearly died laughing because I was jumping up and down yelling, “One of those yellow-gold-American-thingies! Golden finch? Is that right???” and “The purple one that looks like it’s dunked in ink is here again!” has become a regular cry from the breakfast table.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen him prouder than the day we heard a bird calling and I said, “Oh, that’s a cardinal. Or else it’s a mockingbird.” We found it in the bushes and it was a mockingbird. The idea of me being able to identify a cardinal’s call was only slightly less impressive than the fact that it had occurred to me it could be a mockingbird.
I moved here in the winter and had never experienced gosling season but once the “Goslings! Goslings! Goslings!” began traipsing across our grass, their stubby little wings flapping at their sides, I was a goner. I watched the families tootle through our yard so often that I began to know which ones were which, how many babies each family had, who had gotten an early start and who were like me – late bloomers. When an injured gander hobbled by one evening I quickly counted their goslings to discover one was missing. It made me cry. Natural order be damned.
When wildlife and people mix, heartbreak is often the result. Every year a goose builds her nest in our overgrown, unplanted garden, lays six or seven eggs, and sits idly there, protecting them for thirty days or so. She’s done this far longer than I’ve been here. My husband tells me she has been coming for ten years or more.
Because we live in a regulated community, there is a property owner’s association and they answer to the residents. Very few people, it seems, are as thrilled with the geese as we are. Just a week or so before the goslings were to hatch the property owner’s association called in Tennessee Wildlife Resources to destroy the eggs by addling them and replacing the damaged eggs back into the nest. They did this by boat, when we were not home, without contacting us first.
I have never seen my peaceful husband so angry. I have never felt such a tug on my heart, as I did day after day when I watched the goose sit on her nest, preening and wondering. She stayed on her nest for forty-two days past when they should’ve hatched. The eggs rotted beneath her.
We wrote letters, raised hell, and have in writing a statement that no one from Tennessee Wildlife Resources will ever come on our property again without knocking on our door for permission. But the thing I had trouble fathoming was the outright hostility the people in our neighborhood displayed toward us for loving the geese. The reaction was as if no one had ever considered that perhaps at least some of the residents had moved here not for the golf courses, beaches, fishing and boating, but for peace, wildlife, birding, and sunsets.
As the summer wore on and the surviving goslings grew up (two geese had managed to hide their nests well enough) the pain waned. At least until I wrote this. I am not so single minded that I don’t understand other’s points of view. The geese here have no natural predators so their numbers grow quickly. They foul the beaches, golf courses, and yards of the residents, which raises sanitary issues. But had any of those people who verbally attacked me in the newspaper had to sit on their porch for forty-two days and watch a mother’s heart break, they might have strived harder for a more humane solution. But maybe there isn’t one. And that’s another thing I’ve learned. You can’t have everything.
The families have gone south now and only transient
There’s still a lot going on too. The lone blue heron of years past found a mate this year and they produced a “Baby heron! Baby heron!” who struts along our retaining wall just like his parents. The pair of beavers who live in some mysteriously hidden part of the lake float and swim twenty feet out every night at sunset, diving and disappearing if we get too close to the water.
The other day even my husband was jumping up and down because three Pileated woodpeckers landed in the oak tree and one of them was clearly a junior. There are Carolina nut hatches, hummingbirds, redheaded woodpeckers, Eastern bluebirds, robins, crows, doves, mockingbirds, kingfishers, common flickers, whippoorwills, ducks, coots, Brewer’s blackbirds and many others I can’t yet identify that visit us daily.
Even after two years I learn new things about birds every day. Yesterday I spotted a crow chasing a giant rust-colored hawk while other crows screamed encouragement from the treetops. Near as I can tell, they were protecting a young one. Later, a dove pretended to be injured to lure my neighbor away from her fallen baby when he got too close with his lawnmower, something all birds do, but I never knew.
Birdsong carries over the leaf blowers and motorboats and reminds me to listen as well as look. Some mornings their voices are a cacophony of first graders singing Christmas carols at the tops of their lungs. Other days, one lone twitter will be the only sound.
Two years ago I was a city girl and I could name all the species of birds I’d ever seen on one hand. Two years ago I couldn’t even tell you what a robin’s song sounded like even though they are abundant where I grew up. Two years ago, I didn’t care, but here, on this lake, I have been given gifts in abundance. Stillness. Peace. Birds. Balance. And yes, even heartbreak. But mostly, I have been given joy.
As autumn reaches out and transforms the green leafy havens into golden blazes, more will fly south but others will come. It won’t be long before I’m yelling “Buffleheads! Buffleheads!” on a cold wintry morning.
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