This morning I walked back into my bedroom just as a chickadee flew through the inch-and-a-half window opening into the room and immediately fluttered around the window looking for escape. I closed my door, then knelt at the window and began to slide the lower sash upward, thinking I could open the window more and "herd" the bird outside. But the chickadee flew into the space between the two window panes and could no longer get wing space. I slowly lowered the sash back toward the sill until I was able to reach into the space with one hand to touch the chickadee and then at last to grasp it lightly and move it quickly (with one tiny claw clutching my finger) from its niche to the other side of the window and freedom.

I had been sitting in front of the window shortly before this event, noticing chickadees flying back and forth over the porch roof below, as they went from the feeders on the south side of the house to the spruce tree on the north side near the road. They do love that spruce. Just about any time of day, I notice chickadees moving about its branches.

I consider most every bird a blessing, even starlings at this time of year, as they sing bits of other birds' songs…the call of a robin, even the phrases of a thrush. With deep snow laid about from three weeks of storms, a summer bird call just causes me to look at the top of the maple to make sure that there's a starling there.

Why I didn't study ornithology, I'll never know, because I've loved birds all my life. Particularly since I went to a university with an excellent ornithology professor on staff. Maybe I was too lazy; maybe I didn't want to mar the love of their beauty and musicality with the knowledge of their innards.

I remind myself daily that April 1st is only four weeks, no, three weeks, even now only two weeks away. And the snow will magically disappear in runnels of water running downhill wherever possible. Yesterday I caught sight of a black bird in the brushy swamp I pass each day, but it lifted large to be a crow. No bright red wing epaulets of the red-winged blackbird. Not yet.

But it will come. As will spring, here in the northern latitudes.

the birds are living
one more spring
they have survived the other country
of slash and burn and killing spray

they have survived
and for their own spirit
sing, never dreaming that as they do
our human spirits sing, too

(from "Bells in the Woods")

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