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.

After I married and hubby built and mounted a wooden feeder outside our own country kitchen window, I still watched only casually, noting the birds I recognized and passing the others off as unknown look-alikes.

Then, in winter of 1975, a blizzard hit. We were marooned. While I had ample sunflower seed and shelled corn in the garage, a serious shoveling job from nearly two feet of drifted snow awaited anyone who ventured out. Still, I cleared an area about 10 feet in diameter around the feeder.

But even filled, the feeder could barely serve a half dozen birds, so I scattered buckets of seed on the ground. The birds flocked in, desperate. Dozens of cardinals, doves, chickadees, sparrows, juncos, and oodles of the unknown look-alikes crowded in, squabbling. I've no idea what the little birds ate; their small bills prevented them from cracking open shelled corn and sunflower seeds. Perhaps they foraged among the crumbs from others' feeding. I didn't know any better. I thought birds ate seed. Period. Never mind that different sized birds need different sized seed — or something other than seed. Surely birds died in spite of my well-meaning but ill-informed efforts.

Nevertheless, there came the spark.

One mid-morning, atop the rim of the shoveled-open space, a little cluster of birds foraged together, almost as if for safety among themselves. Three were streaky brown with yellowish chins, black bibs, and startling little horns. Horns? Weird, I thought. The six others--well, they were almost all white, delicate little things, unlike any I'd ever seen. They seemed unreal.

Curiosity aroused, I scrounged through my feebly stocked bookshelf, looking for that childhood Golden guide, and thumbed through page by page, looking for matches. The perky brown guys with miniature horns turned out to be horned larks, "common in harvested fields," the guide noted. But the white ones? Oh my! Near the back of the guide, I finally found them: snow buntings. Birds from the Arctic tundra! Creatures that rarely come this far south, the guide said, but often flock with horned larks.

And I was hooked. These little guys outside my window had flown thousands of miles from the Arctic. That astonished me. I had to know more. The spark!

Now, of course, I've learned way more about birds and have seen both species dozens of times--along with hundreds of others around the world. But those two sparks ignited the fire. They're special.