It was early and we were drinking coffee on the front porch. My wife had the good chair, the one where, if you tilted your head the right way, you could use the post to keep the sun out of your eyes after it came over the treetops. Which was fair, because she was up first, which gave her rights. Also, she made the coffee, as she did most mornings, which gave her even more rights.
Me, I was holding up the New Yorker at a weird angle between all that brightness and my face, reading a story about Bridget Everett, who has a show on HBO and is apparently a very funny person, though approached from the wrong angle I could have been accused of attempted virtue signaling by reading a smarty pants magazine in kind of a showy posture. But really, I was just trying to block the sun.
When I looked up I could see a brown pelican cutting high across the island, his body kind of crooked to the wind. Then came a magnificent frigatebird, who kind of dolphined through a headwind, rising up into a stall, then nose diving to gain back some momentum. It didn’t look like there was any reason for him to do it, other than it was probably kind of fun.
The week before I’d been out in the street, trying to take a decent picture of a chair we’d been given – thanks, PE! – when I’d heard a northern mockingbird singing softly to himself. Which was a first. Every year at this time, you start hearing the gray catbirds sing softly to themselves as a kind of warmup and practice before they migrate north, but I’d never heard a mockingbird do it. I tend to think of them as birds that go full throttle in everything they do.
A week later, the mockingbird had turned the volume up – not to 11, but to a solid 7. When some rich people in a Cessna Citation flew over, it almost seemed like he was trying to harmonize with the jet noise.
In the tree next to the driveway there was a gray catbird, who was not practicing anything, and certainly not harmonizing. He was just loudly yowling out the same felinesque call over and over again, seemingly to no one in particular. After a while we were both like, yes, we get it, you’re a catbird.
When I finished the story about the comedian I moved on to a long piece about some right-wing provocateur who was vying to take the place of Rush Limbaugh in the American hatescape, but I quit after a couple paragraphs, because how much space do you want to let those people take up in your psyche?
The sun finally rose high enough to reach the edge of the roof and I could read my magazine like a normal human, and my wife got up to get on a Zoom call. I was just starting to read a long piece about a man who’d taught English in China years ago and was following the entrepreneurial careers of some of his students, when I heard it – a buzzy little call I’d been hoping to hear for a long time. I froze.
A couple weeks ago I was talking to the woman and the three little girls who live across the street, and they said something to the effect of how they loved seeing the painted bunting that comes to the feeder we have hanging out front, and I said something to the effect that it was really great they were enjoying it, really great. Because they are nice people, and it seemed inappropriate for me to go on a spittle-laced rant about why why why were they getting to see painted buntings at my feeder when I had hung the damn thing up yet had not seen them? Children generally don’t need to see adults having temper tantrums.
It’s not like I hadn’t seen painted buntings before. I’d spent a couple hours in a friend’s backyard last winter and managed to see them. And I’ve seen them a bunch of times at places like Fort Zach and Indigenous Park. But if you see painted buntings every day of your life, you are still not seeing enough painted buntings.
Male painted buntings are about as technicolor as it gets in North America, a three-pronged blast of color – green blue red. Joseph’s dreamcoat has nothing on them.
That buzzy little call I heard was a painted bunting. It was coming from low in the seagrape.
It took a few minutes for me to see the bird, partly because it was wary, and partly because I was looking for the wrong colors. It was a female, and while males are all multi-hued vibrance, females are yellow-green overall, better to hide in the foliage and go about their day.
After five minutes of me not moving a muscle she finally leapt up onto the feeder. She stuck her head in, grabbed a seed, spit it out, then stuck her head back in and found a seed she liked better. I wondered if she saw me as part of the landscape or just something she didn’t need to worry about unless I moved. She stuck her head in a few more times and gulped a few more seeds before a van drove down the street and she flew off.
She came back about 10 minutes later, though, this time with a male painted bunting following a few branches behind her.
She made it back to the feeder and started eating. The male crept closer and closer and, I believe, was also about to jump up on the feeder when the dog came out onto the porch. The dog only wanted to sniff at the leaves of the mint plant, but there’s no way to explain that to buntings, and they took off again.
They didn’t return for the rest of the morning, which was fine. There’s always tomorrow morning, and the morning after that. And I have a whole stack of magazines to read.
