Tonight is a good one for simple gratitude–it has been another beautiful weather day. It is so wonderful to see watch nature bursting awake with the heat of summer-like weather–even at this hour (8:39 p.m.) it is still 76 degrees outside. As I’ve walked onto campus each morning over the past few days I’ve greeted by a beautiful flowering tree. I haven’t taken the time to figure out what kind of tree it is, and it almost doesn’t matter. Looking at it is a feast for the eyes (the picture–taken with my smartphone–doesn’t do it justice) and to see it every day as I approach my building at work makes my heart glad.
The other thing I was particularly happy about as I walked into work this morning was that I had a close encounter come with the “little bird with a big voice” and am inching ever closer to identifying this mysterious songster. I have heard it several times–as long ago as October when I first moved here, and as recently as, well, this morning. Only this time I not only heard it, but finally saw it flitting in the tree outside my office window. It’s pretty impressive that I could hear the singing given that my office window does not open and is double-paned glass. But the clarity of the song was unmistakably the one I’d heard all those months ago but hadn’t seen. So when I finally saw it, I spied a tiny, relatively nondescript brown bird, it’s little throat rippling to produce the sweet sound. I took several photos and a few videos of it, cursing that the camera on my smartphone is inferior to my camera at home with which I’ve captured so many fine closeups of the visitors to my feeder. Tomorrow I will take my camera with me to work and see if I can zoom in on the temporarily unidentified crooner.
Anyone who knows me or who has been reading this blog for long knows a few things about me, particularly as it relates to my love of birds and my stubborn determination to stalk an unfamiliar avian noisemaker until I’ve located where the sound is coming from and have photographed and identified the suspect. I love being able to put a “face” with a voice. It’s just a matter of time before I’ve solved my latest ornithological puzzle. Last summer, in my relentless pursuit of the maker of a particularly shrill call at 5 a.m. nearly every morning, I stalked and successfully “bagged,” by means of my camera, a photograph of the noisemaker. I then set about searching online for a website that would help me identify the creature. That’s when I discovered “All About Birds,” a project of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and through the process of elimination identified the dark-eyed junco as my shrieking, trilling alarm clock. Once I had a name for it, I found that I actually came to enjoy the call; now that I knew what was making it I came to appreciate it, though it never did sound lovely to me. My plan is to use the same identification process to discover the identity of the little bid with the big voice. You know I’ll report back once I know who I’m dealing with.
I’m grateful for a number of related things this evening: the first is curiosity. While I wouldn’t characterize myself as insatiably curious, I’m grateful to have a measure of this particular gift. I see, or hear, or take in information through my various senses and say to myself, “Hmmmm, I wonder what that is? why that is shaped like that? how that enormous boulder ended up there? How can such a tiny bird make such a big, clear, beautiful noise? These are not the “big,” deep questions about the meaning of life, but are nonetheless intriguing in their own right. And more often than not, when I pay attention to those things I am curious about amazing new worlds and pieces of insight open up to me. I am grateful for this gift.
I am also grateful for the natural beauty that is all around me. So often I have hankered for living out in the country, and yet I continue to find myself living in more urban areas. While I haven’t given up hope that I’ll live out in the country some day, for now I live where I live and appreciate nature where I find it. My delight at the small critters that live in and around my yard–the many varieties of birds who have cleaned out the last of my seed for the year until I restock in the fall, the squirrels–black and gray, and the as yet elusive rabbits that seem to appear only late at night, though I saw a bunny in my neighbor’s yard this morning. (It’s good to see plain ol’ cottontail rabbits again–all I saw in California were the long eared jack rabbits, which were cool in their way.) These are not the big animals like the deer that often trotted down my street in California, or the wild turkeys that hung out in large numbers in the parking lot of my condo complex, but they are what I have here in my little back yard, and I am happy.
These are simple things to be grateful for, but I am grateful nonetheless. And I’ll be pleased as punch when I’ve finally identified my little brown friend whose voice brings me such joy that I stop all the “important” things that I’m doing to listen, record, enjoy and share it. I’m likely to continue to do that, and you know what? I like that about myself, and that’s saying something.
You Guessed It! It's Little Bird...
