💥BRILLIANT BLACKBIRDS on Burnaby Lake💥

The blackbirds are back! Actually, they've never been away, but that day they were "biting" as never before, devouring seeds which they shelled in a split-second. We also saw gorgeous pintails, as well as teal, coots, mallards, wood ducks, and the inevitable honking, aggressive Canada geese. My backyard birds are a constant source of wonder, and Bentley has taken to watching them from the window, leaping up every once in a while as the house finches fight over the window feeder. The finches have taken over the yard, and there are so many of them at the feeders (mostly females) that we have to assume it's nesting time and they need the food for their young. Our big old cedar tree is a kind of highrise for bird species and fat (pregnant and nursing) squirrels. We've even seen a mama squirrel flattening herself down on a cement block to keep her supposedly-weaned babies from nursing. All this has been here all the time, and I never saw it. Makes me wonder about other things I don't see.

"BLACKBIRD, FLY!" I follow a handsome wild bird on Blakeburn Lagoon

These bird encounters are a more profound spiritual experience than anything I knew in fifteen years of church attendance. Following this bird to a magnificent closeup was nothing short of magical.

Blackbird, bye-bye

From the time it first happened, it has always seemed magical to me that blackbirds fly down to eat out of your hand at Piper Spit, the dock on Burnaby Lake. I've even had a bird in each hand, but this time they took turns, not always graciously. I've never seen so many of them at one time, all of them greedy to be fed. For months I've noticed this flock, juvenile males who were probably hatched last spring, and they were too shy to come down, though they did take an interest. They seem to like to mass in a clump of bushes near the entrance of the dock, and even if you can't see them, you can hear that exquisite song. And when people walk by, they don't fly away. They know a good thing when they see it! But with the capricious habits of birds, we may not see them again until next spring. 

What kind of bird is that?

"With a golden head, a white patch on black wings, and a call that sounds like a rusty farm gate opening, the Yellow-headed Blackbird demands your attention. Look for them in western and prairie wetlands, where they nest in reeds directly over the water. They’re just as impressive in winter, when huge flocks seem to roll across farm fields. Each bird gleans seeds from the ground, then leapfrogs over its flock mates to the front edge of the ever-advancing troupe." - Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology

http://www.birds.cornell.edu/page.aspx?pid=1478

Take these broken wings

The first time a blackbird flew down to eat out of my hand at Burnaby Lake, my hair stood on end (figuratively speaking). From the time I was a little girl, I longed to have a bird light on my hand, and  I even used to stalk them, wondering why they always flew away.  A mean neighbor kid said I could catch a bird if I put salt on its tail, and I literally went tromping around with a salt shaker in my hand for the longest time. I also took home baby birds I found on the ground, which I now realize was a mistake: in many cases the parent birds are still feeding them. I've seen nearly-full-grown crows screaming after their parents, still wanting a handout. The birds I took home nearly always died, or were so close to being adults that they just flew away on their own.

But birds.

I lost my beloved Paco a couple of years ago, and it still hurts. How it hurts. The bond between bird and human isn't understood unless you have it. Most people say it's "only a bird". Now that we know more about the intelligence of ravens and crows, attitudes are changing. Paco was a sweetheart, a violet-blue lovebird who at only a few weeks old was highly sociable and smart. Then, only a few weeks in, I found her dead in her cage.

Losing Paco led indirectly to gaining Bentley, but our attachment to Bentley was amplified, I am sure, by the loss of Paco. Bentley, too, came from a difficult background. No one quite knows the extent of the trauma, but I am sure he would have died had someone not rescued him in time. Covered with dog bites and nearly emaciated, he was found wandering around Surrey, the toughest neighborhood in the lower mainland. He had no tattoo, no chip, nothing to identify him, but he clearly wasn't feral. Once he recovered he turned out to be a wonderful pet. His loyalty and protectiveness towards us is a palpable thing. He is simply dear.

But these, my wild birds, I still have. It was a delight when the first bird of spring descended. Over the winter we kept hearing the delightful ker-squeege of their song high in the bushes, but no birds ever came down. The ones I saw up there looked immature. Even now they are still a little shy of full adulthood, their feathers a bit mottled with juvenile camouflage. The big, lusty males of last summer must be off nesting somewhere.

These are a comfort to me, because to be honest, I have lost so much over the past several years that I can't begin to count the blows. I am sort of afraid of totting it all up. Some of it was stuff or people I had to walk away from, because it or they had become suffocating. Some was simply taken from me. Life is about loss, no matter what our shallow, striving, materialistic culture might think (if you can attribute thinking to it at all).

You don't try to get it back, and there are no compensations. Not really. You just keep going, and going, into the unknown.

Bye-bye, ASSHOLE!

(Note: these videos were made last summer. Thus the shorts.)

This afternoon my husband and I went to one of our all-time-favourite places: Burnaby Lake, a sort of Shangri-La by the Shore that never fails to calm and thrill me at the same time.

Our favorite spot on Burnaby Lake is called Piper Spit. This is a large expanse of shallow water, a kind of wetlands on the margin of the lake, with a long dock for walking. At the end of it is a sort of round viewing area which gives you a great view of whoever happens to be making an appearance on that day.

We've seen sandhill cranes, dowitchers, wood ducks, Canada geese, blackbirds, cowbirds, mallards, some sort of diving bird we can't categorize, and probably a few dozen more species that move so fast or hide so well that we can't make them out.

The red-winged blackbirds, though - they are very special to me, ever since I realized that they will, when the mood strikes them, fly down and eat right out of your hand. As a little girl I would have fallen over with ecstasy at this, as I was always chasing after wild birds and never catching them. Someone had told me that if I put salt on their tail they would sit still for me, but somehow it never worked.

Today, the blackbirds were skittish and uncooperative. That was fine, because birds have a sort of group mood (like humans, who are also flock animals, though far less intelligent and perceptive). You see mostly juveniles who were born in the spring at this time of year, and they're wisely mistrustful of humans. The great gorgeous mature males seem to have no fear. More than once, I have had a blackbird in each hand, with other blackbirds trying to dislodge them. But for some reason, today the bold birds had taken off to parts unknown.

I had the seeds in my hand, I could HEAR the birds make that lovely "squinge" sound that just seems to open up Paradise, I could see them flitting about in the tree tops. I walked back and forth for a long time with my hand held out, and probably looked a bit foolish. But they weren't coming down. Only two weeks ago I'd had a juvenile male eating out of my hand. Oh well. I was about to give up on the whole thing, when.

Where.

Did.

This.

Guy.

Come.

From.

This was a "type", not a person. Big, husky, moustached. His belly seemed determined to take up more than its allotted amount of space. It was taking up a separate universe. He seemed "Important" in some obscure, overinflated way (in other words, FAT), like an unofficial Park Guide or Ranger Smith-type. I could almost see his Captain Marvel badge beneath his sagging sweats.

He walked up behind me and just stood there, freaking me out.

"No. No. No. They like black oil sunflower seeds." That was the first thing he said to me. This guy didn't say "hello" or tell me his name. Not even a friendly wave. Maybe his name was They Like Black Oil Sunflower Seeds, but it didn't seem very likely. It seemed more likely that his opening line was advice, based on the fact that I obviously didn't know what the hell I was doing and desperately needed him to set me straight.

"You gotta get some black oil sunflower seeds. You should get rid of that stuff you're trying to feed them, they won't take it." (They had "taken" it a dozen times, eagerly, in the past.) "Or you can maybe try picking some of the sunflower seeds out of that stuff you have. No, I mean right away, do it now! Try it!" Feeling hypnotized by his mediocrity, I actually made a feeble effort to pick out a few sunflower seeds before thinking, screw you.

"That guy is super-friendly" (pointing to one of the more shy birds in a treetop, one that was basically indistinguishable from all the others. In other words: if that bird is 'super-friendly', and I am not - unlike every other bird-lover on the planet - attracting him, I am either innately repellent to blackbirds or just so inept that any bird worth its salt would stay away from me and my wormy seeds.) The way he said it, "super-friendly", had a funny kind of imperative inflection: 'I told you not to do that!", like a weird sort of accusation.

His parting shot was, "Don't shake your hand" (I had always found that sifting the seeds a little made them more visible and brought them down more readily). "Don't make those noises either." Oh! So bird noises don't attract birds. That's why people ALWAYS whistle and make bird noises to birds.

They're wrong.

Do you know, never once did I ask for any sort of advice from this guy? He never even gave me his name. He just walked right up to me out of nowhere, Mr. Learned and Omniscient Outdoorsman Who Knows A Hell of a Lot More About Blackbirds Than I Do, and just merrily said, "you're doing it wrong, you're doing it wrong, you're doing it wrong" - and, moreover, "I know how to do it right, and now I'm going to tell you how so you can stop making a complete fool of yourself."

I didn't fully realize I was a victim of mansplaining until I got in the car. On the way home I began to boil. "I wish that son-of-a-bitch could have SEEN me that day in August when I had a large male blackbird on EACH HAND, and then a female blackbird intercepted and knocked one of the males off. I wish that son-of-a-bitch knew that I've been attracting and feeding blackbirds out of my hand since the first day I came here! I wish that son-of-a-bitch knew he had the WRONG BLACKBIRD when he said 'that guy's super-friendly'. It could have been any blackbird. In fact, it WAS just any blackbird. He probably knew that and did it just to shame me and make me feel like a loser!"

Asshole!

I think he was a little bit surprised that I didn't thank him. I think he was a little bit surprised that I didn't clasp my hands beside my face and say, "Ohhhhhhhhh, Mr. Blackbird Expert! THANK you for saving my afternoon by pointing out all my mistakes to me and saving me from my own obvious helplessness and inadequacy.  And here I didn't even have to ask!"

My only consolation is that I know from the pit of my stomach that this creep has NEVER fed two, no, THREE blackbirds at the same time, has probably never even fed ONE. He has probably spent his life walking up to people just to point out how inept they are and setting them straight.

No! Not walking up to people. Walking up to women!

Because no guy would ever take the shit I took from this pompous idiot. Because  he does not even walk UP to men like that - just women - weak little, simpering little, non-blackbird-feeding women. He probably walked away swelling with self-importance and satisfaction and felt he'd done his fucking duty for the day.

I would say I hope I never see him again, but no. I hope I see him again. I hope I see him when I have two blackbirds on each hand, and one on my shoulder, looking like St. Francis of Fucking Assisi.
But by then he will have conveniently forgotten who I am - or, worse, he'll think to himself,: hmmmmmmmm! She must have taken my advice!

(Please note. All videos and gifs on this post are of ME with BLACKBIRDS. Super-friendly, aren't they?)

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

Hello, blackbirds!

Another magic moment at Piper Spit, Burnaby Lake. Most of the birds have gone "elsewhere", for some reason (the Canada Day long weekend?), which was a big disappointment. I didn't get to see my gorgeous, majestic sandhill cranes, no wood ducks, no ducklings or goslings, etc. But the blackbirds were out in force, and hungrier than ever. Now that I know I am permitted by the Park Board to feed the birds off the pier, I feel I can do so with a clear conscience. And here they are!

Blackbird singing. . . on Piper Spit

I can't describe to you the feeling of having this handsome devil fly right down to me without any prompting. I know I shouldn't be feeding him, but I am. I'm tired of feeling like an evil human being. I need my moments of utter magic, and I find so many of them in this magical place.

Singing in the dead of night

This started out as something else. Something about Twitter, Tweets, twights, twats (sorry, it's just too tempting) and other things I can't get used to. Not so much the three-or-four-syllable "communications" that people fling at each other, using splng tht lvs a bt t b dsrd. It's the whole concept of alarmingly shorter and shorter attention spans resulting in messages that have been reduced to a nanosecond-long chirp.

Worse than that: like the frog in the pot, the water temperature gradually increasing until the frog is quite contentedly cooked, nobody seems to notice or particularly care what we have lost.


Anyway, tweets. Why tweets? Somebody (now probably massively wealthy) thought up this idiotic avian name. Couldn't be more idiotic, unless it was Cow Pat or something. Airbrained. Lightweight. Imagine Keats ("My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness. . .") twittering, tweeting Ode to a Nightingale. Shakespeare ("Love tweets not with the eyes, but with the mind/ And therefore is winged Twitter painted blind") chirping like the bloody chirper he actually was ("chirper" being a nasty name for a blithering Englishman).

"You'll have to learn how to do it," my husband says to me, "because you won't be able to survive if you don't." That's worse than sex. I'll have to do it, as if it's some dire and unpleasant bodily function you nevertheless can't avoid. But what alarms me is what fun everyone else is having, doing something I just bleepin'ly dread.


So anyways. Somebody had the bright idea that we should all become birds, and just twitter and twatter, nitter and natter at each other all the day long. Birds chitter and chatter, but they also kill. They evolved from dinosaurs, more directly than any other living species. In fact, they are now known to be the only direct descendents. Dinos ran around with feathers on, you see, long before they learned how to fly. I can't imagine how creepy that must have been.

Given the shrill vocalizations of most birds, including Jasper my addle-headed lovebird who must think he's a full-sized Amazon parrot, those dino-birds must have been deafening. They probably had the same cold round beady black eyes my pet bird has, those scaly feet (some remnant of lizard scales, no doubt). My bird feels a strong attachment to me, but that's because he's convinced I'm either his mother or his mate. Without the steady flow of seed mix, he'd completely ignore me.

So anyways. What am I getting at here? Nothing much. Why not Bark-bark or Neigh-neigh or Worm-bluggh (or whatever worms do to communicate)? No, it had to be Twitter.


I'd call that Twittiotic.