Published: July 30, 2009 08:24 pm      

He was still a father

I know how he

Bird lovers only today, please.

Maybe you’ve noticed I’m partial to animals, and this is the time of year I get the urge to write a column about the ones with feathers. I don’t know what it’s like in town these days, but out here they’re all over the place. And that’s the way I like it.

Earlier this spring I hosted 46 cedar waxwings, who stopped for lunch on our crabapple tree on this way through town, and in April I almost wrecked the car on Oldtown Road, when a pileated woodpecker flew onto a telephone pole as I drove by.

Yesterday I spent half the afternoon watching a male house sparrow trying to ditch his family. He seemed to have gotten sick and tired of fatherhood, and had apparently missed my robin column last year which pointed out how quickly, after all, the young leave the nest.

He was trying to hurry the process, and I could hardly blame him. There were four big babies beating heavily after him everywhere he flew, like overloaded helicopters, plopping down beside him and chittering, and flapping, still begging to be fed.

With Mother nowhere in sight (she wasn’t so dumb — probably down at the office with the other liberated females), he deserved a lot of credit for bringing up such a big family so successfully.

He could probably have written a book about it — Dr. Squawk, on bringing up birdbabies — but instead all he seemed to care about at this point was turning them loose on their own. It was an inclination not unlike some I have felt in the past.

Not a chance: they bumbled after him from tree to tree, landing crooked, tripping over each other, but getting better all the time, he and I were pleased to notice. Finally, he brought them over to our feeder, which I fill once a week in the summer, just to keep an eye on things when they’re most interesting.

He arranged them in two neat rows on the slanted roof (they kept sliding off) and spent a long time hopping back and forth with seeds for everyone. Then he straightened them up, asked if everybody had gone to the bathroom, yelled “Hawk!”— and took off when they ducked. (At least that’s what it looked like to me.)

He flew like a song sparrow, with great swoops of joy, probably off to collect Mother and take a vacation. I know how he felt: when our own children left home for good, their father and I took a memorable trip to Scotland, and it was lovely.

For quite a while, the young birds just sat there, shoving a little. Once they thought they saw Dad flying in from the other side, and they all rushed over the peak of the roof, unbalancing the feeder so that it was only with a good deal of fluttering and milling about that they all got on again.

It wasn’t Dad however, but no-good Uncle George who had just heard about the free food, so they all settled down again. Once in a while one of them would sort of fall off the roof and swing in underneath to eat some seed, and then scramble back up, making everyone bustle about to fit him in again.

Then the neighbor’s cat came along. He’s a birdlover too, like both of you and me. He settled down on the patio to watch the proceedings, and I braced myself ready to rush to the rescue if necessary. It was all over quickly. Suddenly in from the maple tree flew the father, yelling and dive-bombing the bird on his way. The mother followed, and together they launched the family into a nearby forsythia. The kids might have made it safe and sound anyway, but Dr. Squawk, it seems, couldn’t help being a parent after all.

The cat went home, disgusted. And I went into the house and wrote out a check for our daughter in college.

Maude McDaniel is a Cumberland freelance writer. Her column appears in the Times-News on alternate Sundays.