Lunch with the birds is a delight

By JACK RONALD
The Commercial Review
They shouldn’t really be here, but they keep hanging around.
There are a pair of them, and while they don’t show up every day, they do appear frequently enough that we know they’re still in the neighborhood.
They are a pair of Carolina wrens, and according to Stokes Field Guide to Birds, Eastern Region, this is about as far north as they’ll be found at any time of the year. To see them here — rather than in Florida or Texas or Louisiana — in bitterly cold January and chilly February is remarkable.
And yet that’s clearly what they are, charming little birds slightly larger than a kinglet, with a white eyebrow and a rich buff along the belly. Their tails stick up sharply and expressively as they move around the backyard, hopping on the woodpile, perching on the snow-covered charcoal grill, or visiting one of the feeders.
There’s nothing quite like backyard bird-watching this time of year. After all, no one wants to be outside in the sloppy slush or latest batch of snow.
Sitting at the kitchen table at lunchtime on a lazy Saturday with a bowl of tomato soup steaming in front of me and a bird book handy may not be everybody’s definition of a good time. But I find it the perfect way to get through winter.
I’ve lost track of how many bird field guides we have in the house.
As a kid, I was given the Roger Tory Peterson guide as a birthday present when I was about 12. While that copy disappeared, it was replaced soon after we were married. An Audubon guide was purchased a few years later, but Peterson was usually the go-to authority.
The Audubon guide featured color photographs, but the illustrations in the Peterson guide were generally superior. Then, back in 2000, The Sibley Guide to Birds was published and quickly became the kitchen table reference bible when an unidentified feathered friend appeared.
The illustrations — by artist and author David Allen Sibley — were remarkable and the information was exhaustive.
But there was just one problem: The Sibley guide weighed about three pounds and was too large to toss into a backpack on an afternoon hike. It was encyclopedic in both scope and weight.
We chanced upon the Stokes guide this summer and immediately snapped it up. It’s as authoritative as both Peterson and Sibley. (There are 29 pages on sparrows alone!) But it’s the size of a normal field guide, easy to carry along and incredibly easy to use.
Like the old Audubon guide, it relies on photographs. But Donald and Lillian Stokes have taken bird photography to a whole new level. Instead of a single photo of a particular bird, there are at least two. The bald eagle is shown in a total of 11 photos, in flight, perching, and at different times of year.
You’d think, that any backyard birder would find that to be enough.
But for my 65th birthday, my daughter Maggie gave me a copy of Bright Wings, a new book that harnesses together two of my great loves: Birds and poetry.
With illustrations by David Allen Sibley, the poet Billy Collins has put together a wonderful anthology of poems about birds. There’s Walt Whitman on eagles, Marianne Moore on the pelican, Elizabeth Bishop on the sandpiper, Howard Nemerov on swallows, Ralph Waldo Emerson on the chickadee and Wallace Stevens offering 13 ways of looking at a blackbird. Every turn of the page is a surprise and a delight.
And on top of that, it goes well at lunchtime at the kitchen table with a bowl of tomato soup.[[In-content Ad]]