Birds - February 2005

February 26, 2005

It snowed off and on all day yesterday - huge fat flakes. But you'd hardly know it this morning. Most of it melted before the day was done. I enjoyed so very much watching the birds at my little feeder on the balcony. ("Balcony" sounds so much greater than the tiny little outdoor cage we actually have....) There were more birds than usual due to the snow covering their natural feeding areas most of the day. I've again put out yellow millet mixed with raw black sunflower seeds in the shell. I can buy both either at the street markets or at Oskar - they are food products for human consumption.

The sparrows seem to prefer the millet which kind of surprises me. But we have some birds that look a lot like chickadees, gray backs, black caps, white throats, but they have greenish yellow breasts. They act like chickadees, though - won't eat the millet but pick up one sunflower seed at a time and always fly off into the trees to either eat or store them. Yesterday I realized that while the sparrows were gone one little guy was patiently tossing millet out with his beak onto the floor of the balcony and even off onto the sidewalk 2 floors below, searching for sunflower seeds. The mourning doves love it when they do that because mourning doves are ground feeders and won't come up to my third floor bird feeder. I know a lot of it is wasted that way because people walk on it and squish it into powder before the mourning doves have eaten it all. I have 3 or 4 cups of sunflower seeds in a bag in the container I use to store their food, so I quickly pulled it out and put a handful on a plate and set it in the corner on top of the railing, wedged underneath the security bars. Within a couple minutes they were back - at the feeder. I watched and sure enough, it wasn't half a minute later and the little guy tossing millet out again spied the black sunflower seeds on the plate below. No more tossing millet for them!

I love to hear the sparrows chatter at each other - they sound so cheerful. I find that funny, actually, because when they are chattering away at each other it's almost always because they are arguing over who gets to eat. "Get out of my way!" "It's MY turn, you've been there forever!" "Hey! Let my wife have some of that millet, you pig!" "I'm bigger than you, I'm more important than you, I deserve to eat NOW and as much as I like!" So, they fight and squabble and fly into each other to get each other to move, and chirp at each other from nearby grapevine branches or even while sitting on the closer cross-bars. And I sit here at the computer, listening to them outside the office window, and casually think to myself as I'm busy writing or working on something - "what cheerful little guys they are! I wish I were as free as a bird..."

This morning I woke up again before it was light. Mel was sleeping very restlessly and I kept turning over, disturbing him, so I decided to get up. But while I was in the process of deciding to get up I could see movement outside our bedroom window against the dark gray sky. Without my contacts in all I can see are the fuzzy outlines of the bigger tree branches and movement when the crows fly. Nothing is in focus and I can see no smaller items at all. But I knew what was going on because I've watched it before. Every morning the crows gather together for a morning fly-about. Sometimes there will be a hundred or even more. In Kiev I saw a huge flock, must have been 500 or more, flying in circles above the courtyard of Predslava one morning. They swooped and glided and swirled ever higher up as they caught the updraft from the heat escaping the surrounding buildings. Eventually they were all high enough to disappear into little specks on their way to various parts of the city. I wonder where they all come from each morning? Where do they spend the night? And loud! Oh my, are crows loud. Crows here are bigger than American crows by quite a bit, but they are smaller than a raven (they are called ravens, tho - but compared to ravens in Alaska, these guys are pretty puny).

Well, yesterday morning and this morning I was awake and up to watch the morning fly-about here on our street. I like to think of the crows as the mafia of birds - they dress all in black, they have huge weapons (their beaks), they intimidate all the smaller birds, they are involved in waste management :):), they gather for important meetings and rituals every day, and they rule the skies. Yesterday straight off our balcony and maybe 10 feet higher I noticed a pair of mourning doves sitting on a branch, about 10 inches apart. A crow flew in and settled on another branch a yard or so away, at the same level. And a second crow arrived and settled down on a nearby branch of another tree. Within seconds the two mourning doves had skooched closer and huddled together. I wondered if it was for protection, or if they would have done that whether the crows were there or not. I always see these two mourning doves together and I thought to myself, he's protecting her as best as he can from the bad guys. Alas, I was busy and didn't see the end of the confrontation. But to my knowledge the mourning doves will be cooing outside later today and the crows never seem to disappear.

All of this reminds me in many ways of human relationships and society in general. I'm very anthropomorphic.

Ravens in North America are so beautiful, so big, so strong, so intelligent - no wonder they are favored by the American Natives in the States and Canada for totems and in their folk stories. While we were at Canyonlands National Park in January, I fed some whole grain bread to a couple of ravens in the parking lot of a trail head (shame on me! Don't feed the wildlife!). When it came time, one of the ravens tried to prevent us from leaving by actually dive bombing the car twice as we pulled out onto the road!

Thinking of ravens in Alaska being so much bigger than the crows/ravens here in Ukraine (and maybe all of Europe?) - I wonder why the North American seagulls on the Pacific Coast are so much bigger than the seagulls along the southern Atlantic coast - and why all of them are so much bigger than the seagulls here in Ukraine? And now, thinking of seagulls - did you know the Russian word for seagull is tchaika? Which when turned into a family name becomes Tchaikovsky. So the great Russian composer was Peter Illyich Seagull. (I wonder if that's where the idea for the name Jonathan Livingston Seagull came from???) And progressing on to name meanings - Wayne Gretsky is of Ukrainian descent and Gretsky is the Russian word for walnut. So the great hockey player is actually Wayne Walnut. Somehow Wayne Gretsky just sounds a little more intimidating on the ice than Wayne Walnut, don't you think??

All for this morning. I think you've probably had enough!