Here’s what happened...

First, I must confess that my attention has been drawn to birds lately.  My wife would  say “focused,” and I’ll admit it as long as she doesn’t say obsessed when she talks to the neighbors about it. She, too, is actually focused on one particular bird which spends a lot of time on a high branch of a big fiddle-leaf ficus growing in a huge planter near our front door.  All creatures poop, and this bird does it a lot... on our walkway.  Maybe the bird considers its droppings a gift... the way small children do if their parents are perceived to be focused on bowel movements.  

The bird that sleeps by our door is just one of many that live on our hill. Doves and hummingbirds have nested near my window. Since our young hummingbird left the nest, I’ve been on the lookout for it.  Several blooming shrubs around our place attract hummingbirds, but I can’t tell if any one of the several who spend time there might be younger than the others.  I’ve thought I might recognize a clumsy adolescent hummer among them, but I didn't. We also have orioles, house finches, sparrows, scrub jays, wren, warblers, and a couple of kinds of woodpeckers. Parrots from Hillcrest on the other side of the valley come over to our hill sometimes to survey the territory. They always fly around in a squawking bevy, but they never seem to like what the see.  

Mostly, I haven’t noticed  patterns of bird visits to our yard but it’s clear that they come to feed around the flowers and bushes. Occasionally, around four  o’clock in the afternoon hundreds of crows fly west to east in Mission Valley, but I don’t know what that’s all about. I don’t know if they congregate somewhere near the coast and all start off a few at a time like battalions of aircraft on bombing runs of if they start off as a few in the west and pick up others along the way.  They fly east by the hundreds, but I’ve never seen them return together; so apparently they straggle back individually or a few at a time on their own.  Some people don’t like our crows, but I do.  They’re smart creatures.  

My favorites are the hummingbirds and the doves.  Hummingbirds seem smarter than doves; but, of course, again I don’t know what I’m talking about. Hummers seem a bit more cavalier than doves, some might say they are ruthless... even cruel.  I think the mother who was with us this spring actually got rid of one of her chicks. I tried to save it by putting it back in the nest, but she rejected my help and put it out again. She took very good care of the one that remained in the nest... and she did it with no help from a male bird.  As far as I know, she built the nest all by herself.  He didn’t come around at all after the mating ceremony, to which, of course, I didn’t get an invitation. On the other hand, the male dove last year pitched in on all the parenting tasks.  He helped build the nest, such as it was.  Doves’ nests can hardly be called structures... nothing more than a few twigs laid across just about anything that’s reasonably stationary.  In our building doves have laid eggs on the tops of light boxes.  People who don’t want the mess put rocks on their light boxes to discourage them.  My doves last year used a hanging basket that I had put up for a pot of flowers. They got to it before I bought the flowers... half a dozen twigs and straws and they were in the business of making a family... Mom and Pop dove, doing it together.  Before the eggs hatched, the male spent as much time sitting on the nest as the female did.  After they hatched, the male brought food as regularly as the female did.

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My ramblings about the lives of San Diego birds is not what I intended when I began this journal writing.  I am writing because of something mysterious that happened around nine o’clock last night when we came home from an event at a Balboa Park museum. A small bird, a wren or a sparrow, followed me into our apartment.  I had left the door open while I put down some bags, and the bird flew into the living room and perched on the frame of our James Rabby painting of sunflowers. It’s the first time a bird has come into our house, so Margaret hurriedly closed bedroom doors to keep it in the front part of the house, hoping it would go back out the way it came in.  Before I could grab my camera for a picture of it sitting on the painting, It flew into my study... and out again... and out the front door. That was it.  That’s what happened.  

When the bird flew in, I had already posted my BLOG yesterday, the one with E.E. Cummings’ poem that ends with “I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars not to dance.”  My focus was obviously on birds. My picture for yesterday was a saucy female mallard I had photographed up close after she had hopped out of the pool of the fountain in front of the San Diego Museum of Art. I took two pictures of her, so I’ve included the other one today.  A more colorful male mallard was in the pool with her, but he didn’t come out. She kept up a loud quacking quarrel as she marched around the raised edge of the pool before flying off in the direction of the reflecting pool. 

I know it’s just a coincidence that the little brown ball of feathers came into my house on a day when I had been thinking and writing about birds... actually, after I had been quietly celebrating the reality of birds in my life. It was a coincidence... wasn’t it? I went down to the river with my camera today looking specifically for birds.  I heard them singing, but I didn’t get close enough to one, not even a duck, to get a picture.  Go figure...

My picture for today is nasturtiums.