A lifetime fascination with birds

May 11, 2008 12:03 am

— Just last week I spoke to the Audubon Society Chapter at Pittsburg, Kan., and enjoyed getting to spend some time with folks who truly love all aspects of nature, especially birds.
I wish now that I had spent more time studying the life of John James Audubon.
As a kid in the pool hall back home in the hills, I remember Ol’ Bill telling me that he and Audubon had gone to school together, and that as a youngster, Bill had taught John James how to use binoculars. He also claimed that once during recess when he saw the younger Audubon boy drawing insects he suggested he paint birds instead since they were so much more colorful.
I think my talk went over really well except for my woodpecker recipes.
On a more serious side, I myself have had a great fascination with birds since I was very small. I wanted to grow up and be a waterfowl biologist when I was only 11 years old, and floated the Big Piney River in the fall, sneaking up on wood ducks and hooded mergansers and mallards and teal and widgeons and gadwalls. I laid every duck I killed on the boat seat beside me and tried to keep the feathers neat and orderly.
I just couldn’t stop looking at each species with such fascination. John James Audubon and I had that much in common. He loved to study birds, and he actually killed and stuffed hundreds and hundreds of birds, so he could study them closely.
Many bird-lovers wince when they hear that, but he wasn’t prone to make a target out of any living creature. He just had to collect specimens for his work.
When I was a kid, I couldn’t get outside enough, and it was birds that drew me to the woods and the river in the winter. There were so many birds to be seen, some year-round residents and some just passing through ahead of the first cold winds.
I remember seeing a huge white-headed eagle taking a December bath above a river shoal, throwing water into the air, as he seemed to be enjoying himself immensely. With a blind on the bow of the boat, and my dad paddling slowly forward without making a sound, we floated to within 30 yards of that big bird. I couldn’t wait to learn all I could about eagles in days to come.
It was always that way with each new bird. A kingfisher lit on that blind one day as we floated the river hunting ducks. He was perched there only for a couple of seconds, only a couple of feet from my face. I found a book in school the next day which told all about them, how they nest in tunnels back into the river bank, and the nest is so filled with fish bones it appears they might be using them to shore up the tunnel.
The little green herons that were so numerous along the river in the fall always fascinated me, they didn’t appear to have any green on them whatsoever, but rather a purple, rusty color, a mean look in their eye and more patience than I could imagine.
As we would float along, you’d see one of those shikepokes, as Grandpa called them, at a shallow spot, intensely staring into the water, as still as a statue. They might not move a feather for five minutes or more, and then when the time was right they would strike with lightning quickness, and come up with a beak full of small fish or minnow.
I read all about the pint-sized heron and found that they had been known to bait small fish at trout ponds or creeks where visitors would feed fish small pellets of commercial food. The shikepoke would take one of those pieces of fish food, place it in the water before him and wait for it to attract a small fish or minnow, and then he’d nail his prey. The book I read said it was the only bird known to take fish by the use of bait.
I am no less fascinated by birds now, and have developed quite a bird sanctuary here where I live, on Lightnin’ Ridge, in the heart of the Ozarks. It is a ridge-top of big timber, old growth oak-hickory woodlands, and there is a tremendous variety of birds here.
Right now, I have a pair of Baltimore orioles which I am hoping might nest somewhere close. They are large, beautifully colored birds, black and orange and white, and they love nectar. It is strange to see a bird that large clinging to a hummingbird feeder trying to drink that sweet nectar. Behind them comes the secretive rain crows, or yellow billed cuckoos, which are heard a great deal, but seldom seen in those high white oak branches where they nest.
Bluebirds nest in the boxes I put out for them, and a pair of mockingbirds nest each year in a cedar and redbud thicket behind the garden. One of the most fascinating birds I have seen lately is the blue grosbeak, similar in color to indigo buntings, which we have a lot of, but much larger, with rusty wings. There are brown thrashers and fly-catchers, and kingbirds and summer tanagers and butcher birds and in a little wet opening in the back end of the woods, I saw a woodcock mother with tiny chicks a couple of years ago.
There are so many kinds of woodpeckers in these woods, you’d be amazed. Two big pileated woodpeckers can often be seen right out of my office window.
Last week, just before daybreak when I walked out of my back door to go hunt turkeys, there were both chuck-wills-widows and whippoorwills singing. There are screech owls, barred owls and great-horned owls on my wooded ridge.
In May and June, it is easy to call screech owls and barred owls right up into the oak branches next to the house. And it is also easy to call in the bobwhite cocks which run around in circles below my screened porch, beside themselves with excitement, whistling their heads off.
It might be noted, and often is remarked about by visitors, that Lightnin’ Ridge is sort of an unkempt place at times, with unmowed grass a little too high and raspberry thickets allowed to grow fairly close to the house. But then again, no one ever complains about all the music, the songs of so many different kinds of birds you can’t help but notice that the trees just seem to be alive.
I don’t know how anyone lives without birds, certainly I never have, and will not if I have a choice. I have been told there’s lots of money in clearing your land, selling the logs and putting in acres of grass to feed herds of cattle. And I have been told the craziest thing in the world is someone who thinks he is rich because he has a forest full of wild birds all around his house. But in the spring, how can anyone live without them?