I found a redheaded woodpecker (more accurately, a red-breasted sapsucker) dead on the ground yesterday, which caused me to lament again the senselessness of window-induced loss of bird life.  He (and by his bright red head, I know he was a he) had apparently slammed into the glass even though the curtain was mostly pulled.  

Considering the number of birds around here, it doesn’t happen all that often, but it’s still sad.  I’ve tried stickers on the windows, and I close the curtains as much as I can bear, but still a bird neck or two breaks against the few windows of my tiny house every year.  I can only imagine what damage those huge glass skyscrapers do.

When my mourning was complete, I fell under the spell of his beauty.  His feathers so soft and colorful; the patterns of black and white, red, browns and even yellows so precise and intricate.

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I opened a wing to see that each feather was colored in such a way that its placement on the wing contributed to the overall pattern just so.  Were this an art project, the advanced planning to create each individual feather with markings to exactly fit its place in the grand scheme would have been astonishing.

For a furred animal, each hair comes from a localized position on the skin.  So it’s fairly easy to see how a spot or a stripe arises.  My calico cat is awash with stunning swirls of various browns and blacks, but I could paint that by flinging a few coffee and late choices on a canvas with my eyes closed. 

On this bird, long feathers extend out from the skin, and lie against each other in a puzzle of overlapping pieces. And they all fit together to make a recognizable pattern, a pattern so repeatable that I can look it up in my Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds and find my red-breasted sapsucker staring back at me from the woodpecker section.
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Life is amazing, even in death.

​I’ve been listening to these Bird Language tapes my sister gave me – Bird Language by Jon Young  (My sister is just the right kind of veterinary DVM, herbologist, nature freak crazy, BTW.  She’s the best!)  Jon Young was talking about not only recognizing that birds are calling, but figuring out what they are saying. 

Are they making alarm calls, mating calls, or just calm conversational calls?  Part of bird language is their behavior, too.  Did they suddenly fly to a higher part of the tree as if something wicked this way comes?  If you’re paying attention to birds, you can also be more clued in to the other animals moving through the landscape.

He also said that birds tell you something about yourself by their response to you as you move through their habitat.  If you’re calm and don’t appear to be a threat, then they won’t sound an alert or fly away.  According to him, even your mood on different days can affect the birds’ responses to you.
 
Flash non-fiction (True story!):
A couple of days after listening to these lectures, I was making my usual rounds of our property.  Suddenly, I heard the crazy frantic peeping of a flock of bird near a little above-ground pond I keep for the critters here in the high chaparral. 

“Oh, no!” I thought.  “A wee little birdie has fallen in and is drowning!”  Yeah, I know.  What a dork.  But that is indeed what I thought because, before I put in extra rocks, I actually found some poor little dead birdies in my pond one morning.  Very sad.

Anyway, I ran over to see what the commotion was all about.  No birds in the water, but the whole bush behind the pond was literally (and I  literally mean literally) a-twitter with frantic little yellowish gray birds.  (Next job – learn bird species.) 

One rather ragged-looking little fellow just stared me in the face from about three feet away and continued to peep.  “Hmm.  I thought.  I guess I must be a really great person, since they’re not flying away even with me right here.”

I dumped the pond to get them some fresh water, and …  “STHHHhhhhh!!!”  A rattlesnake, about ten feet away on the ground.  Ah ha!!  They were sending out an alarm about him!  I was just random noise in their far more dangerous world.

Had I understood bird language I would have realized their response was less about me and more about the real threat down there where they were going for water.  Taking another look at that ragged-looking fellow, I realized he had more of a shell-shocked look about him than a calm, "oh-what-a-nice-person-that-is-staring-at-me" expression.

So, I'd better get back to listening to those Bird Language lectures. And paying better attention!