The only show in town

A commenter on this morning's post wants to know how I learned to know my birds, which is a good question without an easy answer. The short answer is this: when birds are your primary source of entertainment, you learn birds. But how?

Five years ago when we moved out to the woods, I was pretty ignorant about birds. I knew robins, of course, and the more common colorful birds like bluejays and cardinals, but not much else. Our housewarming party was visited by a brilliant little yellow bird and a blue one that certainly wasn't a bluejay, but they didn't have an invitation and no one knew their names.

One day soon after that I was in the bedroom ironing, my least favorite household chore, and I suddenly realized that if I put a birdfeeder outside the bedroom window, I'd have something to look at while ironing. I recalled that there was an old feeder out in the shed somewhere, so I found it, filled it, and hung it just outside the window. In the time it took me to walk back inside and look out the window, half a dozen goldfinches were perched on it.

I was hooked.

We started shopping for more feeders and set up a feeding station within easy view of our big front window. Our house is located in an ideal situation for birdwatching, providing a welcoming environment to a variety of different types of birds: halfway up a hillside, with woods, open fields, and a creek nearby. Despite this, we really hadn't seen many species before we put up feeders. The feeders flushed the birds out of hiding and brought them into plain view.

Identifying them became the next challenge. We keep bird books near the front window, and at first we would set small challenges for ourselves: okay, here are three smallish birds with gray on their backs, but how are they different? The tufted one is a titmouse, the gray-blue one a nuthatch, the tiny one with black flashes a chickadee. Next, what about all those little brown birds? It took a while, but soon we easily recognized the more common visitors.

But we also had help--and a little luck. The first time my colleague from the biology department came out for a visit, we were walking in the upper meadow when we happened upon a pair of shy indigo buntings making a nest, a sight we'd certainly never seen before and may never see again. Then on the way back down the hill her ears perked up and a huge smile broke out. "Orioles!" she said, scanning the tops of the tall sycamores along the creek to find the flash of orange and black. She recalled as a child spending hours on end trying to track down the source of the oriole's rare and lovely call, but she hadn't heard one in decades. We felt blessed.

Five years later, we're still learning. I only recently figured out how to spot the phoebes, which suggests that either they haven't visited the feeders in the past or else I just confused them with titmice. (There's a titmouse perched on a houseplant on the porch not two feet from my face right now, looking in the window as if trying to identify what it sees. Are they as curious about us as we are about them?) I still can't reliably distinguish the sparrows of various species, especially the females, which all look like pretty much the same little brown bird. And sometimes a migrating bird will stop by, challenging us to reach for the bird book again.

But it really comes back to my first answer: we live in the woods without television and with very bad radio reception; for entertainment, we have birds, butterflies, wildflowers, trees, and sometimes small woodland creatures. When birds are the only show in town, you learn birds.

Just don't ask me to identify the stars of any of the new fall television shows. I'm not familiar with their plumage.