Birds of a Feather

In regard to chickadees and bird feeders, I've come to the conclusion that humans may be just as startled by wildlife as wildlife to humans. My experiment with the chickadees has been going well. Today whole flocks came to feed alongside blue jays and a pair of flickers. I stood with seed in my outstreached hand as still as possible at the feeder, waiting with patience and the sound of fluttering wings above my head. Twice the chickadees came to the feeder with me standing there and both times I was startled which in turn startled them and off they flew.

Winter goal

Since my earliest memories, I have despised talking animals. In the childhood years you get the typical Wind in the Willows and Charlotte's Web fare with toads and pigs conversing in their lingua franca nonsense while attempting to illustrate the higher social good that can generally be found in most children's books. All of this animated blabbering seems to lead reminiscing adults to engage with those talking dogs and cats that creep into the yearly offering of television commercials and greeting cards and any other medium for such nonsense. To my mind, the talking animal seems to be one of the more ridiculous human conceits - humans included in most instances.

But since my earliest memories, I have held a special fascination for people who could "commune" with the animals. In the old fairy tales these people are always quite good and pure and wholesome and as a child I generally aspired to be such a person but when the animals failed to appear I figured they were in the know somehow. As an adult, I have given up on being good and wholesome, but I still have this odd fascination with people who can draw wild animals to them. In Chicago I watched in awe as pigeons flew from blocks around to greet the bird man of Lincoln Square and more recently I read of someone so calm and relaxed they could take their fish from the pond to pet them.

Well call me crazy, but I've decided to indulge my long-standing fixation. Today I set up a bird feeder in front of the cabin with the determination to entice a black capped chickadee to feed from my hand by winter's end. Supposedly this is not an incredibly difficult thing to do and does not require any special goodness or extraordinary calmness. A little patience and tolerance of the cold should be enough, as the chickadee is a friendly and social bird.

But no talking please. If anything, I will learn to speak a little "chickadee" and really set my cap on crazy.