2
KATE LOVED FEEDING THE BIRDS IN THE ENON RIVER SANCTUARY. The first time we went was because my grandfather, George Crosby, had taken me there once, when I was thirteen or fourteen. I had walked to his house from school, probably restless, probably bored, and he’d said that there was a wildlife sanctuary a couple miles away where we might walk around for an hour. We found Enon River, chose a random path, and followed it through a meadow to a boardwalk that crossed a marsh. It was early October, and the sun was low and behind the trees to the west. The cold that had collected itself up in the pines during the day had begun to flow back out into the footpaths. As soon as we stepped on the boardwalk, a small troupe of chickadees began blipping about in the bushes and lower tree branches around us.
“I’ll be damned,” my grandfather said. “Hey,” he whispered. “I think that if you put your hand out, you can get them to come to you here.” We didn’t have any seeds with us, but we stood next to each other, still, hands held out, palms up. The birds circled in tighter and tighter radii, until they nodded and curtsied toward us off the tips of the bushes, no more than an inch from our outstretched hands. When the first chickadee hopped onto the ends of my fingers, I startled at the grip of its scratchy, weightless little claws, and it wheeled off back into the bushes.
My grandfather whispered, “Heh! You’ve got to stay vary steel, so the leedy birdees dond get scared,” in one of his weird, vaguely Slavic, vaguely vaudevillian-sounding accents. We must have been a sight — a short, potbellied old man and his thirteen-year-old grandson, already several inches taller than him, but still a kid, still skinny and thin-voiced and still interested in toy soldiers and plastic tanks and blowing up his model trains with firecrackers, standing side by side on the boardwalk, facing the bushes, each holding a hand out just past the tips of the branches, standing still, squinting into the shadows and light, occasionally whispering back and forth, the old man urging the boy to keep still, but in a funny voice that kept making the boy laugh and say, “Stop it, Gramp.”
Another bird flew onto my fingers. It was above my head, on a branch perhaps twenty feet up. It tipped headfirst off the branch, wings tucked at its sides, and dropped like a bobbin straight toward my palm. It flicked its wings out six inches above my hand, spun itself upright, and dropped onto the tips of my fingers. This time I did not startle. The bird looked at my empty hand, gave me a couple bemused, sideways looks, and sprang off.
I never returned to the sanctuary with my grandfather, and the experience sifted away in my mind for years, until it emerged again one afternoon when Kate was seven years old.
“Hey, Kate. I just thought of something really cool. It’s kind of a mystery, something I remember from way, way back when I was a kid.”
“What is it, Dad?”
“Well, let me just show you, okay?”
We drove to the sanctuary and I walked her down the wide grass track that ran downhill alongside the meadow, high with milkweed, and the grid of swallows’ houses until we reached the edge of the woods and entered them through a leafy archway. The path turned to packed dirt and stone, with steps made out of the trunks of trees spaced every fifteen feet or so. The hill leveled out at the edge of several miles of marsh and interconnected ponds. We crossed a boardwalk hedged by spicebush and willow. Birds began to chirp and call and zipped back and forth in front of us. We stepped off the boardwalk and onto a sandy path exposed to the fumy heat and bright, open buzz of the marsh, swarming with insects. The path led past a low section of stone wall at the edge of the marsh. Clumps of speckled alder grew on either side of the wall.
“So,” I said. “The cool thing is that if you put some seeds in your palm and hold it out, the birds might fly to you and eat right out of your hand.”
“Yeah?” she said. She wore jeans and pink sneakers and a green T-shirt with a cartoon monkey on it. Her hair hadn’t darkened to brown yet and was still bright blond, and long, and not, as I remember, especially well combed. It was snarled and looked a little wild, like vines.
I opened a plastic sandwich bag that I’d filled with black sunflower seeds.
“Take a handful and stand with your hand out, right near those bushes, and be very still, and very quiet.” She scooped some seeds from the bag.
Kate whispered, “Dad!” A trio of chickadees had come to the alder near where she stood. They hopscotched around in the branches at the back of the tree and made their way to the front in a series of formations that looked choreographed.
“Stay still!” I whispered.
“Dad!”
“Don’t worry,” I whispered. “It’s okay; they’re more nervous than you.” That wasn’t true. The birds were tame and used to being fed by people. Kate turned sideways toward the branches. She hunched up and covered the side of her head nearest the birds with her shoulder, as if to protect her cheek and ear. Her fingers started to curl shut over the seeds.
“Open your hand, Kates. It’s okay; I promise.” The lead chickadee perched on the tip of the nearest branch and leaned out. It feinted toward her and she yelped and snatched her hand away. The bird wheeled back up into the branches and chirped twice, indignant.
“It’s okay, my love. It’s a little startlish. You don’t have to do it if you don’t like.”
Kate kept her eyes on the springing birds. There were now five of them in the tree. She held her hand up. The lead bird made its way to the end of the near branch again, and this time when it launched toward Kate, she didn’t move and it dropped down, clinging to the tips of her fingers, beaked around at the seeds until it found one it liked, and whirred off into the tree.
“Dad, Dad! Did you see?”
“I saw, I saw. Keep still and you’ll get a ton of them.” And so Kate stood there, almost like statuary, as a flock of chickadees took turns going back and forth between the alders and Kate’s hand. A screechy, manic quartet of titmice arrived. They managed one or two seeds each from Kate — which she didn’t like; she said they were scratchy and hurt a little — but they mostly just fluttered around in a tizzy behind the chickadees. Two nuthatches scrambled up and down the trunk of a nearby dead pine tree, nyucking and waiting patiently for the chickadees, who were bossy and would not allow any other birds near while they were still feeding. Wilder birds that would not be hand-fed were attracted by the activity and orbited around us — cardinals and blue jays in the trees, sparrows and wrens in the underbrush. When the chickadees finally had eaten all they wanted, the nuthatches dropped down and took some seeds.
Just before Kate’s arm gave out, a tiny yellow bird emerged from the reeds in the marsh. It perched on top of a cattail that ticked back and forth like the pendulum of a metronome. Kate looked back at me and whispered, “Is it okay if I’m done, Dad?” Just as she spoke, the little yellow bird looped up onto the tip of Kate’s forefinger.
I pointed and jabbed. “Tsssst, tssst.”
Kate looked back at her hand. The bird did not seem to notice the seeds. It was smaller than any I’d seen before, save for hummingbirds. But it was not a hummingbird. It was not a finch or a warbler or a wren. I’d never seen a bird like it, in the woods or meadows or in a book. Kate looked at the bird and smiled. The bird sang a liquid, silvery little phrase that was so clear and so limpid it seemed without source, trilling in the air for an instant and evaporating without a trace. (Afterward, whenever Kate and I talked about her first time feeding the birds, we ended our recollections by talking about the little yellow bird and the little silver phrase it sang that neither of us could have said quite for certain we had actually heard, but for the fact that the other seemed to have heard it as well.) The bird remained on the tip of Kate’s finger for another moment and whirred back into the reeds. I tried to sight it with my binoculars but could not find it again.