The birds of Alabama are back, reminding us that we’re not empty nesters at all; in fact, our nest is full if you count the birds that live in the backyard. One of them flies to the glass door each morning and taps to get inside, or so we thought.
The man at the birdseed store corrected us. He says some birds are attracted to their reflections and want to preen and show off, but most want to fight the bird they see in the glass door. He’s an intruder and they mean to run him off before nesting season.
So it’s not that the tapping bird wants to get in, but he does want the other bird to get out, even if he has to bloody his beak in the process.
I’m late to bird-watching, but now I’m hooked. Everybody knows what a crimson cardinal looks like or a big, bossy blue jay, but I have to use my cheat sheet or my “Birds of Alabama Field Guide” to know my chickadees from my nuthatches.
No matter what tribe they belong to, they crowd around the feeder, waiting their turn at the seed, lining up on the deck railing like polite shoppers in a checkout line. By the time my husband has filled the long cylinder with birdseed and come back into the house, they’re on it, perching at the round windows that dispense the seed, filling up their small bellies.
They fill up other bellies, too, and we see the signs of a nest in our mailbox. House wrens, maybe, or bluebirds? There are twigs sticking out of the bottom of the box, and grassy sprigs competing for space with the envelopes and magazines.
This is the third year birds have nested there. One mail carrier crammed the mail into the box, which is what she’s supposed to do, come rain, sleet, snow, or bird nests. I told her we’d get another mail box and put it on the other side of the porch, so she could deliver the mail there and leave the nest undisturbed.
She liked that idea. She and her husband gave up discouraging a determined robin from nesting in the gutters of their house over and over again. They stopped cleaning that part of the gutter during nesting season.
“It’s funny what you’ll do when there’s a family up there. You don’t want to evict anybody,” she said. Our other mailman was less sympathetic. The rules say one mailbox per house, so he couldn’t deliver the mail in one and ignore the other. He pointed out the canopy of trees with high branches.
“They’ve got other places to build,” he said, and continued down the hill on his route, telling the same story to other bird watchers on the street. Bird’s eggs and shopping catalogs won’t fit in the same place. We bought a wooden bird house, solving his problem.
One year, some of the eggs hatched, and we saw a few fledglings lifting off. But there’s bird drama, too. Some birds come back each season to set up house in the same place, or steal the nests other birds have built. They steal each other’s mates, too, like people do in human life, only they do it right in front of everybody.
So why should anybody care about mailbox drama, life and death in bird land, or the romantic flirtations of life on the wing? Because birds are real, not virtual, not on a TV or computer screen. Because they’re beautiful.
“Feed my birds,” my husband says, if he’s going out of town. But they’re not his; they belong to themselves. They come back every day, like regulars at a local coffee shop, calling out to each other and to us.
If we’re late, they wait on the railing for their morning gift. Watching them, I get mine.