My family's foray into backyard birding began innocently enough. On a whim, we ordered a small terra-cotta bird feeder from a home-design catalog, slung it from a tree branch and filled it with a handful of birdseed.
I was almost surprised when I spotted our first winged visitors, a clutch of sparrows who vied greedily for dining space and, in their enthusiasm, dashed most of the seed to the ground. Within months, however, we had added a second, larger feeder, mounted against the side of the house. This was replaced, over time, by a succession of bigger, sturdier, more efficient feeding setups plus a variety of homemade offerings. One afternoon, lugging home a 50-pound bag of black-oil sunflower seeds, I realized that my casual mail-order purchase had bloomed into a full-fledged family obsession.
Once our private domain, our backyard had become a neighborhood pit stop for all manner of avian fliers-by, winging in to grab a birdseed cookie dangling from our bird-feeding Christmas tree or to tug a strand of soft yarn from our nesting bag. We'd learned to recognize their individual calls, from the raucous demands of the tufted titmice to the insistent chip-chip-chip of the cardinals. My seven-year-old daughter, Lily, could identify not just the regulars (sparrows, chickadees, blue jays) but also birds I'd never seen before except in field guides. "Mom, there's a goldfinch at the feeder!" she announced one day to my skeptical ears, and lo and behold, she was right.
Backyard birding, we discovered, is an ideal spectator sport. It's inexpensive and endlessly intriguing, the season is blissfully long (year-round, in fact), and the seats are always courtside. It's also an effortless way to instill in kids an interest in--and even a reverence for--nature. Few experiences have delivered the pure thrill we felt the first time a chickadee alit on my daughter's outstretched palm.
Of course, most birds are a lot more skittish around people than are the gregarious chickadees. From our side of the windowpane, Lily's snazzy red binoculars seemed like a terrific birding tool, but they must have said "predator" to every bird in the vicinity; no sooner would she whip them out than our yard would empty of everything with feathers. To provide the birds with at least an illusion of privacy, we took a cue from Colleen Kelley of the Hitchcock Center for the Environment in Amherst, Massachusetts, and assembled her bird blind--a sturdy cardboard box, with holes for peeping, that can be set on a windowsill. Just as naturalists do with fancier versions in the wild, we can now spy, unobserved, for as long as we like, from the comfort of our own living room. And when our birding is done, the blind can be easily removed and used as a storage container for all of our birding paraphernalia--field guides, binoculars, bird-watching records, sketching materials and the like.
For all the food and comfort we've provided to the birds, it's clear that we've reaped the greater benefit from the arrangement. For the price of a few sacks of seed--and the small effort put into these simple craft projects--we gain daily admission to a backyard spectacle, complete with aerial acrobatics, comic relief and an original score that only nature could provide. But above all, we get a chance to look beyond our human lives--and peek into a world that's both smaller and greater than our own.
