A Christmas gift at the backyard feeder (01/11/06)

It was Christmas morning, and things were off to a leisurely start.

Not everyone was awake, but there was no rush. We'd had an early Christmas celebration the week before, and we'd have a belated one a week later with other family members.

For now, it was just a matter of enjoying the warm sleepiness of the holiday, having a second cup of coffee and gazing out the kitchen window.

“What's that?”

“Where?” I said.

My wife directed my attention to one of the five bird feeders in the backyard. Two have a mix of seed, one hanging on the side of the garage has black sunflower seeds, another hanging from an ash tree by the back fence has thistle seed, while still another has suet for woodpeckers.

“Back there,” she said, “at the base of the feeder by the Jonases' garage.”

I stared at a mulchy-looking area covered with leaves and plants that were dormant for the winter. “I see two cardinals,” I said. “No, three.”

“Four,” my wife corrected me. “But that's not what I'm talking about. Keep looking.”

She disappeared from the kitchen, leaving me there to squint at the brown, leafy area, seeing nothing.

“There it is again,” she said as she came back in bearing two sets of field glasses. Where she found them, I'm not sure. “Let me get a bird book.”

She grabbed the Sibley guide that I'd given her for Christmas a few years ago and started flipping through its pages.

Meanwhile, I wiped some of the sleep from my eyes, readjusted my bifocals, and raised field glasses to my face.

It took a minute to get them adjusted and to find that spot at the base of the feeder. But when I did, I saw it.

“Wow!” I said.

Connie started running through the possibilities.

“It's too big for a kinglet,” she said.

“Much too big,” I agreed, staring at the bird which was ground-feeding near the cardinals. “It's almost robin-sized, but not really that big.”

“At first, I thought it was a rose-breasted grosbeak,” she said, referring to perhaps the most spectacularly-colored bird we'd ever hosted in our backyard.

“I don't think so, but maybe it could be winter coloring of some sort,” I offered.

Page after page was flipped, coffee was sipped, and the Christmas morning clock ticked along effortlessly.

“Got it,” she said.

And she was right.

Our visitor was an Eastern towhee, a lovely, distinctively marked bird of rust and gray and black and white.

“Wow,” I said again. “What an amazing gift for Christmas morning.”[[In-content Ad]]