Wed, Nov 25 2009
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A lifetime fascination with birds 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? 
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