Country Views - Believing in spring

By Tim King

We generally have a small Christmas tree with modest ornamentation. The few ornaments that we do display have sentimental value. Among them are tiny colored bird ornaments with actual feathers. The colors range from scarlet to turquoise to yellow to improbable. Often their wing colors will contrast with a birds body feathers, adding to the little ornaments colorful brilliance.

Our mothers purchased these birds 70 or so years ago. Their feet are made from strong wire that can be wrapped around a tree’s small branches. If a tree decorator mounts a dozen of these colorful creations throughout a Christmas tree, the memory of spring time may be fortified.

Around winter solstice and into the dark and frigid days of January, it’s hard to believe in spring, let alone remember it. Fortification is required. After all, even the birds that our mothers mimicked with these ornaments have abandoned us months ago.

For example the Scarlet Tanagers, she very lemony in color and he with his impossibly red feathers and devilishly black wings, have packed their bags and are spending our winter in the Southern Hemisphere’s summer. I know our mothers’ spirits lifted when, in July, they heard the Tanager’s scratchy-sweet song high in an oak. The male is so unreasonably spectacular that our mothers even had a nearly exact replica in their ornament collections.

The loyalty of the Great Crested Fly Catcher can’t be questioned. At least not in June and July and even early August, when its throaty song is heard through out the day seven days a week. But some time in August we, and perhaps our mothers, looked at each other and asked, “Did you hear the Fly Catcher today?”

In the following days we searched the tree tops for some sign of this multi-colored bird. Finding none, we uneasily looked and listened for the Tanager, the Oriole, and the Catbird. Hearing no song and finding no sign of any of them, we became anxious. Something was changing.

We, like our mothers did, no doubt, became restless and a little irritable.

Kenneth Graham, in The Wind in the Willows, describes how we feel during that time. Water Rat, known by his friends as Ratty, is the most friendly and congenial  of the creatures in the countryside. He loves visiting his friends and there is no greater thing that he can imagine than taking them boating. After an excursion on the River Ratty and his friends are likely to be found having a merry picnic on the stream’s banks.

But, at a certain time after a long and joyous summer, Ratty finds that his friends, particularly some of his feathered friends, no longer have time for him. They are packing their bags to leave. He begs them to stay but they don’t listen. Finally, he loses his temper and asks them why they even bother to come back if they love this other place so much. Some swallows, studying their flight schedules, respond.

“And do you think,” said the first swallow, “that the other call is not for us too, in its due season the call of lush meadow grass, wet orchards, warm, insect-haunted ponds, of browsing cattle, hay making and all the farm buildings clustered around the House of the perfect Eaves?”

It seems that Ratty, like our mothers, and we their children, need a bit of patience. A bit of faith in the cycles of life. Our mothers had their bird ornaments to fortify that faith and we do too. Lately, I’ve discovered both patience and faith by simply looking out my winter window. There is out there a bird as stunningly beautiful as the male Scarlet Tanager.

We are so fortunate to see Blue Jays every day. But with that familiarity comes a jaded sense of their remarkable beauty. We say they are blue, but that word is inadequate to describe the wide range of blues in this sassy birds plumage. It’s crest and the cape thrown over its shoulders are the color of dusky blue plums. Just below the cape, the blue is of the same plums, just a little more ripe. Next comes a checker board pattern of sky blue rectangles. The sky blue pattern of the rectangles is surrounded, top and bottom, with one row of midnight blue. There are about 50 of the multi-blue colored rectangles on the tail and wing feathers of a Blue Jay. Separating each blue rectangle are what may be navy blue or black feathers.  The whole outfit is tastefully highlighted with frosty white.

This vivacious, energetic, and beautifully decked out Blue Jay allows me to believe in spring on these cold gray post-Christmas days.