Week 4Winter Week 4
We have been animals all our lives.
—Maggie Smith, “Animals”
Cold weather is hard on creatures who don’t hibernate. Small animals and birds are burning more calories to keep warm just as their best sources of food—seeds and berries and insects—have disappeared. Predators are burning more calories to keep warm just as their best sources of food—smaller animals and birds—have grown less plentiful, too. Many rodents and reptiles are sleeping deep underground now, and many birds have flown farther south for the winter.
Worse, when temperatures dip below freezing, drinking water is hard to come by for birds and mammals alike. To keep their feathers primed for optimal insulation, birds also need water for bathing, even in winter, and a trickle of sun-warmed ice isn’t enough.
For human beings, particularly for a human being nursing a monstrous cold, it’s a good time to stay indoors, to participate in the natural world by observing it through a window. Fortunately, there is hardly a window in this house that doesn’t look out onto a feeder or birdbath. There’s a thistle feeder just outside my office, a mealworm feeder outside our bedroom, and another mealworm feeder outside the living room. There are feeders with shelled peanuts and whole peanuts and safflower seeds and suet, all visible from my writing table in the family room. There are birdbaths of varying heights on three sides of the house, and one of them contains a heating element that keeps the water from freezing. On very cold mornings, birds of all kinds gather nearby and flutter down in waves to drink.
Some of the birds who frequent this yard in winter aren’t looking for peanuts. They’re looking for the thirsty creatures who come to the birdbath, for the hungry birds who come to the feeders. Because I am too sick to go out, I carry my laptop from room to room, just to vary the view. Almost every day I catch with the corner of my eye a Cooper’s hawk barreling past some window in a flash of wings and yellow claws, or I notice a barred owl sitting still and silent on a tree limb. In winter it is hungry enough to hunt during daytime, too, patiently waiting for some crawling thing to stir in the brush pile, for some unwary dove to land on the ground under the safflower feeder, looking for seeds the other birds dropped.
I think of the woman I know who looked out her window one summer and saw a rat snake climbing the pole to her nest box, heading straight for the place where the baby bluebirds were trapped. Without giving any thought to the reason why bluebirds raise as many as five clutches each year, the woman ran outside with her hedge clippers and cut that poor snake in half. I have seen a rat snake in a state of fear, and I can hardly let myself remember that story, but I remember it every time I see the little hawk slamming into the hedge where the bluebirds have taken shelter just past my own window.
The only thing to do when a Cooper’s hawk stakes out a feeder is to take the feeder down, much as it kills my heart to leave my avian neighbors unprovided for in this changing neighborhood where natural food sources have become so much less plentiful. The hawk and the owl must eat, too, I know, but I don’t wish to make their bloody work any easier. I am drawn to their fierce wildness, but this is not the kind of bird feeder I had in mind. I don’t know if I’m right to feel this way.