The Birds

Birds. I love them and I spend an inordinate amount of money feeding them. Sure I know they have a natural buffet built right into the landscape but I want their happy, chirpy, colorful, feathers flitting past my windows and through my gardens so, I feed them. A lot. They bring me joy and happiness. They remind me of the belief that my spirit was meant to soar high into the heavens. But freedom is not free. And this particular freedom requires bags of seeds, cracked corn, peanuts, suet cake and dog food. Yes, I did just say dog food. Dry dog food to be exact.

We have a rather wide variety of birds here and some of them have a distinct preference for dog food. I discovered this one fine summer day when upon researching a strange noise coming from the kitchen, I found Stellar Jays raiding the dog food dish. I shooed them out. They came right back. I closed that door. They tried to come in the front. Clearly they were fans. We feed our pets Hills Science Diet and it’s great stuff but it isn’t cheap and it certainly isn’t for the birds.

Every day I put out fresh food for them in about eight different places. I do this as part of my morning ritual, right along with having my extra hot latte’ and feeding the horses their morning treats. My little feathered friends literally wait for me in the trees. If I am late getting up, the jays will start squawking and tapping on the window. I don’t mind though. It gets me walking the garden every morning which is something I truly enjoy doing. I don’t have a bunch of specialized feeders designed for individual birds with price tags to match. Mainly what I do is sprinkle out a mixture of feed onto stumps, rocks and logs. They have been pretty comfortable with this arrangement and we get dozens of different species that seem to get along just fine. Trust me, no one is going hungry around here. The mixture that I have found to be the most well received is this: squirrel mix (corn, sunflower, peanut, etc.), no waste seed mix and cheap dry dog food plus several suet cages. And this is how we come to buy dog-dog food and bird-dog food.

So as you can see I love the birds. Maybe just not enough for Science Diet though. It is therefore also part of my yearly ritual to go viewing birds that don’t visit Bluegate Gardens. And that is where you find this post now. The cute little red farm house is in the Skagit valley. You remember when I told you about the valley’s great culinary abundance earlier this year in Trip to Bountiful? Well there is another special delight that the Skagit valley has to offer. Birds!

Every winter the Snow Geese descend upon the valley on their way up to Alaska and Canada. Bald Eagles can also be found in abundance but we come for the Snow Geese in particular. And the reason is this; you can truly experience an Alfred Hitchcock moment like no other. Now I can’t speak for anyone else but I did not grow up around this sort of flocking phenomenon and it can be quite spectacular. Seeing these huge flocks is one thing amazing in itself but the real excitement starts when they suddenly take flight flushing into the air with a great rushing explosion of white feathers. You feel them swirling around you lifting and rising into the sky and for a moment you can feel your soul rising with them high into the heavens. There is no Disneyland roller coaster ride that can compare with that feeling of living energy lifting you up out of your earthly confines.

Now of course there is the other side of this wonderful phenomenon which the great master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock displayed so disturbingly well. Unnerving enough to make every common House Finch look suspiciously like an evil minion from hell sent on a scouting mission, and a giant flock of huge Snow Geese surrounding your house is an active sign of the Apocalypse. If you can manage to get past that collective trauma memory it’s really a great bit of fun.

The other great bird watching event that we always make sure to experience is the Bald Eagles that flock to our northern rivers every winter to eat the dying salmon. The birds are on their way up to Canada and Alaska. Just like the Snow Geese the eagles are stopping off in Washington state to fatten up on the rich buffet before heading off for some long winter months up North. When I was a girl I remember learning of our nation’s dying Bald Eagle population and it saddened me deeply. Species do die off all the time but as I understood it these birds weren’t going naturally, we were killing them off ourselves. I also grew up in areas where I never saw Bald Eagles so they seemed even more rare than imaginable. They held a mystical quality for me, perhaps not too far removed from that of a unicorn. The idea of losing that forever was heartbreaking.

Humans do a lot of terrible things and we make a lot of mistakes along the way. We also do a lot of tremendously wonderful things and get an awful lot of stuff right. Bringing the Bald Eagles back from the brink was one of those things we got right. It renews my faith in the symbiotic relationship of living things when I see the trees full of Bald Eagles.

We drive out to Concrete and Marblemount to watch them flock along the river banks. They fill the trees in numbers I could never have imagined in my childhood. I can stand on the side of the road not five feet from a beautiful majestic creature that in my lifetime was almost lost to eternity. Seeing these birds free and wild in such numbers is a clear and true testament to life. An active display of life snatched back from the edge of total darkness. Some things go when they are meant to go and life ends and is reborn all the time. Sometimes however we get the chance to right a wrong. Sometimes we get to say no to death, not just yet.