Week 5Life can change in an instant, that’s a fact. But life isn’t changing only in those split seconds when it appears to change, when someone is there and then gone.
—Mary Laura Philpott, Bomb Shelter
Back in the time when Nashville still got several snows each winter, and snow days meant sledders on the hill beyond my home-office window, I would work to the sound of children squealing with the joy of speed and freedom. One year I got a text from a parent supervising the sledding: “It’s a robin migration out in your front yard. Do you put food out there for them?”
In all the years I’ve been putting out bird feeders, I’ve never seen a robin at even one of them. But our yard is always popular with these birds, especially in winter, because we don’t use any poisons, and because we let the leaves lie where they fall. Sometimes a giant flock of robins and a giant flock of starlings, plus countless ground foragers—sparrows and wrens and juncos—will be out there at once, competing for space to scratch around the leafy ground, looking for overwintering insects.
It didn’t surprise me to find dozens of robins in our yard on that snowy day, but it surprised me to see what they were doing. A robin’s usual practice is to pick earthworms out of the exposed soil churned up by moles, but there are no worms near the surface on freezing days. Instead, these robins were eating dried berries from the monkey grass bordering our front walkway, the border my mother planted when we first bought this house nearly three decades ago. Normally my husband mows down the dead monkey grass after the first frost, but that year he hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Haywood and I are desultory gardeners.
In spring I prefer planting to weeding. In summer I like to watch birds pulling seeds from dried flowers, so I let the flowers fall to ruin instead of deadheading them to force the plant to produce new blooms. In fall it has always seemed nothing less than criminal to tidy up the golden windfall of sugar maple leaves covering the ground like pirate treasure in a storybook.
In spite of these haphazard habits, I did, in earlier years, tuck the flower beds in for winter—cutting back the dried stalks of perennials, composting the remains of annuals, tugging out the weeds I’d ignored all summer, installing a deep layer of mulch to keep everything safe from the cold. I have a shed full of rakes and spades and three-pronged cultivators because the neighborhood children used to descend in a pack to help me garden. One fall a bunch of them showed up in roller skates and didn’t bother to change into shoes before they took up their tools.
Those children are grown now, like my own, and I don’t tuck in my flower beds anymore. Year by year, the creatures who share this yard have been teaching me the value of an untidy garden. Monkey grass is invasive, in part because birds disperse its seeds by eating its berries, so Haywood continues to cut back the border, but it was hard not to be glad the hungry robins had something to eat on that cold day.
An unkempt garden offers more than just food for the birds. The late offspring of certain butterflies, like the black swallowtail, spend fall and winter sealed away in a chrysalis clinging to the dried stems in what’s left of a summer garden. Others overwinter as eggs or caterpillars buried in the leaf litter beneath their host plants. Most species of native bees—or their fertilized queens, at least—hibernate underground during winter. An industrious gardener pulling up dead annuals could expose them to the cold, and one who mulches too thickly could block their escape in spring. Other beneficial insects like ladybugs, lacewings, and parasitic wasps spend winter in the hollow stems of old flowers.
These days we don’t drag fallen limbs out to the street for the city chipper service to clean up, either. A good brush pile is a boon to ground-foraging birds, who eat insects from the decomposing wood, and to all manner of small animals hiding from predators or sheltering from the wind and snow.
Before I learned the worth of a messy yard, an alpha redbird once established his territory here. Flawless in his scarlet plumage, he was strong and loud and fearless, and he fiercely guarded the safflower feeder hanging just past our back deck. Cardinals will generally defer to bigger birds, or to birds who arrive at the feeder in flocks, but this redbird would not cede the airspace around that feeder for anyone.
I don’t know how many years this yard was his territory—three, possibly four—but I have not seen another cardinal before or since who was quite so ferocious in defense of his own world. Though I can’t say for certain it was always the same bird, it seemed so to me. And I believe it was the same bird I found one cold morning, when I walked outside after a nighttime snow, lying beneath the pear tree at the back of the yard.
Maybe it was just his time to go. But I think often of that stunning redbird lying crooked in the snow, a fallen battle flag, a bleeding wound, a Shakespearean hero come to a terrible end. And I can’t help wondering if his fate might have been different if I had known back then to keep a dense brush pile in the yard for birds to shelter in on pitiless winter nights. Would he have survived to reign undisputed when the days finally warmed and it was time to sing again?