Bird Feeders

This evening I put up four poles; two are topped with hopper feeders with a bird-seed mix, one supports a niger-seed tube feeder and a safflower-seed tube feeder, the other supports a suet feeder and a tube feeder with a bird-seed mix; all four poles have baffles to discourage squirrels and other critters from ascending to the feeders. This was a big deal to me; a big deal to Vickie. We’ve moved, and in moving we’ve left one bird community and are now inviting another bird community into our yard. Did I mention this is a big deal to us?

Two or three days ago I took the feeders down from the Zuck Homestead, a place of rest and renewal for us for three years, and a place where we’ve entertained a bird community; wrens and titmice and cardinals and blue birds and cow birds and pileated woodpeckers and downy woodpeckers and red-breasted woodpeckers and red-headed woodpeckers and nut hatches and chickadees and blue jays and thrushes and…well the list goes on. I didn’t want to take the feeders down, even though they were mostly empty due to the fact that we’d moved almost two weeks ago. If you’ve never fed birds, never watched them, never really watched them, never watched the fledglings trying to figure out their new world, you might think I’m even weirder than you thought. But if you have known the joy and amazement of focusing on an aspect of creation, whether birds or not, then you understand in some measure what I mean.

I think back to our house in Strasburg, to the dozens of cardinals who frequented our feeders and grove of cedar trees and wonder how they are doing; or I think even further back to a Christmas morning on Physic Hill Road in Chesterfield when a Scarlet Tanager made a special appearance at our feeder; or think still further back to our home in Becket, MA when a group of turkeys put on a dance around our feeders that rivaled anything the Rocketts have performed. On Physic Hill Road I used to watch one tree by our feeders for 30 minutes at a time and marvel at the interplay of creation that unfolded – birds and squirrels running and flying to and fro; I could write a book about a day in the life of that one tree. Then there was the Saturday in Beverly, MA when while visiting a friend in Beverly Farms I saw my first Baltimore Oriole; when I got home and told Vickie she told me that she had seen one in our neighbor’s backyard that morning too, one that we had the pleasure of seeing off and on for weeks in our neighborhood. I’ll take a Baltimore Oriole over a Lexus or BMW or Mercedes any day, or even over a gallon of banana ice cream…and I love banana ice cream.

Our bird friends on the Zuck Homestead have been with us for three years; they’ve given us pleasure and delight; their habits have fascinated us; their company has comforted us. I suppose that sounds strange, those words “comforted us”. But when we behold creation we know there is a Creator, and while we humans may be poor at praising our Creator it seems that the birds generally do that pretty well – even the predatory hawks and owls play their role on a fractured planet. I wish we could leave a forwarding address for the birds on the Homestead but we can’t. They won’t know why the feeders are no longer there; there were some birds still there this week even thought the feeders were empty. The good news is that the eye of their Creator, the eye of our Father, is on the sparrow; and being on the sparrow His eye is also on us, on Vickie and me and on you. I can trust our Father to care for the birds on the Zuck Homestead and I can also look forward to a new community of creation in our home in Chesterfield.