My Items

It was about 5 p.m. and I was thinking about making dinner when I went into my front room to close the venetian blinds. Through the horizontal slats I saw a large, white shape atop the condo building opposite and I could hardly believe my eyes - a Snowy Owl was staring back at me! I was thrilled to see this Life Bird I had chased for hours earlier that day.

We had the standard yard birds in southern CT, a short list of robins, blue jays, catbirds and starlings are all I remember. But one day my father suddenly pointed out a spectacular raspberry-colored bird and announced excitedly that it was a Purple Finch. I was amazed that there were 'new' birds we could find. that was the beginning of my bird watching.

Simultaneously I couldn’t believe anything could be that YELLOW, anything that yellow could blend in with anything other than a banana stand, and that I had struggled so much to see it. I was entranced. The entrancement led to stuffing every moment of free time in the coming summer with looking at birds, reading about birds, or thinking about birds.

When I was eight years old my father bought me the "Golden Guide" to birds, one of the classic series developed for children. I had a general interest in nature at the time and was fascinated by seashells, wildflowers, and reptiles... as well as birds. One day I saw two "new" birds on a branch, facing each other and doing a "dance".

My mother was a lifelong friend and teacher in so many ways. It was not long after she passed when a female cardinal started hanging around our back window. I felt the bird wanted to show me something. And then the male cardinal appeared and the two were dancing on the porch railing, seemingly playing a game. To me they were my parents, my mom now reuniting with my dad, having fun as they often did.

The bird was a robin in Concord, seen through the eyes of my poet brother, Alec. His words brought the robin to our house one night in the fifties, and I've loved robins ever since.

The first bird I remember being able to reliably identify (besides feeder birds) was the bufflehead. My brothers and I called them "bubbleheads" which seemed to make sense to us because the male's head looks like it has a white bubble on top.

I was out in the front yard of my family's home on Monroe Street on the edge of town. It was Thanksgiving break from school and we were raking leaves in the front yard, under the giant oak trees. I seem to remember a slight dusting of snow on the ground. A flash of movement caught my eye and I looked up into the heavy, spreading branches of one of the old oaks to see a large white bird swooping to a landing.

As a kid, I watched birds out the kitchen window at our little wooden feeder. Since we didn't have a "bird book" and knew almost nothing about birds, we made up our own names: wild canaries, red birds, rain crows, striped-headed spatzies, and that mysterious leaky-faucet bird. Gradually, after Mom bought a Golden guide, we put accurate names to birds, but we still knew nothing of phenomena like migration.

I experienced my spark bird roughly 10 years ago in northern New Hampshire. We were at my in-laws’ cottage on a little lake for a summer visit, and I heard an eerie wail, echoing across the water. “What is that!?” I asked. I’d never heard such a thing, growing up in Ohio.

My first bird book was the little Golden Guide to Birds by Herbert Zim. I was helping my younger brother David with a 5th grade teacher who asked every kid to go out and find 30 birds in town (which every student should do). We were in a Concord woodlot when we saw and heard a bird I had not seen before. Flipping through my Zim there it was in full color, a thrush with a reddish crown and bold black spots on a snow white breast.

In the early 2000s I lived in Watertown, MA. The house behind me had a split-rail fence and a massive oak tree, and the owners would be out feeding birds every day. To be honest, the rest of us were not thrilled with this…. The seed attracted critters and tons of pigeons, who left droppings everywhere. They roosted in the oak tree, which was menacing enough since it had pulled apart at its fork, after crashing some heavy branches on a neighboring roof.