I fancy myself a bird watcher, but it's pretty much limited to the birds I can watch from my living room. We have a seed feeder and two suet feeders just outside it, and we get a lot of chickadees, juncos, tufted titmice, nuthatches, downy woodpeckers, hairy woodpeckers and, a little less often, flickers and finches. Last year we saw pine siskins regularly; this year I haven't seen a single one (although I've heard them on occasion, their calls always reminding me of a thumb running over the spines of a plastic comb). Last spring we saw white-throated sparrows, and I hope they'll be back singing their delicate oh-sweet-Canada song, and hopping lightly on the porch in search of spilled millet.
The red-breasted nuthatches were a species new to me when we moved here; I had only been familiar with their white-breasted cousins. They are tiny things, flitting to and from the suet cages, perching on legs like toothpicks. Smaller, even. Their heads are dark, setting off a bold white stripe above each eye. Their downy sides and breasts are rusty, their backs and wings slate-colored.
What I find so enthralling about the red-breasted nuthatches, however, is not their plumage but their apparent lack of wariness of me. Countless times I have opened the creaking screen door to go out to the porch for a load of wood or to refill the feeders (swiftly emptied in the bitter months of winter), and one of these tiny birds is clinging with its minuscule claws to a suet cage, unperturbed by my presence. Or so it would seem. Have they observed that I never reach out to catch them? Do they associate me with the food they find suspended from the porch roof? Have they learned and communicated this information within their flock? Why wouldn't they flit away with the other birds, or heed the alarm calls of the chickadees?
I can't answer. I don't know how many there are, because they all all look the same to me, and so I like to pretend I am encountering the same individual on my porch each time, even though I know this is highly unlikely. I am tempted, too, to anthropomorphize -- to imagine the bird is my friend.
This is foolish, I know, because a nuthatch is a wild animal. Still, I enjoy its company as I go about whatever business brings me out into the cold, and I enjoy even more seeing it at close range: the joints of its legs, the individual feathers of its wings, its bright eye.
I was told that when I became a mother, I would develop a mother's ears -- I would be able to distinguish the unique timbre of my infant's wail, and I would be able to pick up the faintest cry from many rooms away sans baby monitor. This did not prove to be true, and it was my husband whose ears who became attuned to the sounds our children made. When, at two in the morning, I am groggily trying to understand why one of our children is -- talking? singing? sobbing? -- he is headed to their bedroom, having already identified that it is our daughter crying because she woke up from a nightmare.
So I did not get mother's ears, but I did develop a new capacity for sight. I have mother's eyes. I am obsessed with looking at my daughter and my son -- their toes and eyelashes and the curve of their ears. With my eyes I drink in the shape of their mouths when they smile, or the taught plumpness of their cheeks when they cry, the tints of my son's blue eyes and my daughter's blond hair. I can easily call to mind his uneven baby teeth or her strawberry-colored birthmark. I eat them up with my eyes, I cannot get my fill of looking at them.
And so it is with the wild birds that come so close to my domestic world: I long to and love to get a little closer, to visually seize them in all the small, fine details of their tiny, fragile bodies. My children are wild animals, too, though their wildness is subdued, tamed somewhat by home and routine and manners at the table and yes you can look at that if you're careful and no you can't play until you've cleaned up this mess. When my daughter was a newborn, I regarded her as a wild creature; she might have abilities I didn't know about (it seemed she could sense us in the room even if she couldn't see us -- was she somehow aware of the air disturbed by our breath or the heat emanating from our bodies?) and she felt almost completely inaccessible to me. Her inner world of wants and needs and preferences was hidden from me, in part because I lacked that other aural ability mothers are supposed to have, which is to distinguish one kind of cry from another: hunger vs tiredness vs discomfort. They all sounded stressful to me and raised alarm bells in my head, and I always felt I had to stop her crying or risk losing my mind.
Still, all babies are mysterious, to some extent. Even a parent adept at interpreting her baby's cry cannot know how the baby is interpreting the world. No one can remember being pre-verbal; what is it like to have thoughts, but never words? Once they are pointing and signing and speaking, babies have a much larger receptive vocabulary than they do productive; that is to say, they understand many more words than they can say themselves. The development of their inner world outpaces their ability to communicate about that world.
And this lasts for years, I think, and even adults have trouble putting into words what is in their minds, so perhaps it never ends. We are all wild and mysterious at heart, even if we are not trying to be secretive. Even if we are, in fact, trying just the opposite -- to be transparent and reveal our souls to one another -- we are at least occasionally at a loss for words.
The mystery of the wild birds is that they cannot share their experience of the world with us. The nature of their consciousness will, perhaps, be a mystery forever. The mystery of my children is that they can share their experience of the world with me, but only to a degree. My son is just starting to say words, and my daughter is just starting to have secrets, and thus there is uncertainty in our relationship. They are not always predictable, their minds have an element of wildness, and though my eyes can rove over them and see them completely, I cannot get beyond the surface to know completely their inner worlds. The frustration of this is that I want to know them perfectly and never can; the joy is that I will go on learning who they are my whole life long.
