One morning this week, a male cardinal ornamented the bare quince bush outside the bathroom window, and we thought of another window. It’s in the attic of the Amsterdam warehouse where Anne Frank and her family hid from the Nazis for two years during World War II. On Feb. 23, 1944, Frank, in her famous Diary of a Young Girl, wrote this:
“Nearly every morning I go to the attic to blow the stuffy air out of my lungs, from my favorite spot on the floor I look up at the blue sky and the bare chestnut tree, on whose branches little raindrops shine, appearing like silver, and at the seagulls and other birds as they glide by on the wind. . . . As long as this exists, I thought, and I may live to see it, this sunshine, the cloudless skies, while this lasts I cannot be unhappy.”
The chestnut tree is gone, felled by a storm in 2010. Frank died, reportedly of typhus, in 1945 in a German concentration camp at age 15. The sky, the wind and the birds survived. This Christmas give a child, or anyone else for that matter, the gift of birds with a feeder and a supply of good bird food, seeds, suet, peanut butter, fruit or nuts. Supermarket seed often contains a goodly supply of milo and other cheap seeds that few birds eat.
Birds delight with beauty, entertain with song, amuse with antics and amaze with acrobatic flight. They bring nature close or, in the case of chickadees and a few other species, right into the palm of your hand.
New Hampshire Audubon’s Christmas bird count is under way. Judging by past years, bird watchers can expect to see 50 or more species this winter. Many will come to a bird feeder or its environs, including, as happened one year, the Cooper’s hawk that haunted White Park and swooped down to harvest a mourning dove beneath the feeder. Nature red in beak and claw, yet few things warm the heart as much as the look on a child’s face as he or she stands stock still, arm extended, bare palm forming a platter for seeds, when a chickadee lands.
The purple finch, rarely seen some years, may be the official state bird but the black-capped chickadee is the official bird of winter. Chickadees are a song-filled third of an ounce of curiosity and a flying, rewritable hard drive. According to ornithologists, each chickadee hides food in thousands of places and remembers the hiding places, a feat that might be credited to the bird’s ability to allow neurons in the brain holding old memories to die off, to be replaced by new ones ready to hold new memories. Chickadees, according to the Cornell University ornithology lab, are also sentinel birds whose “chickadee, dee dee” warning is heeded by other bird species, the more “dees” the more urgent the alarm.
This week, the birds seemed happy, the sunshine was bright, the wind slow and far warmer than it’s been for days. Birds of all sorts, the chickadees with a sound like a deck of cards being shuffled, zoomed to and fro around the feeder. We don’t know for sure what their flight augured, but like the cardinal, they seemed to be saying “Merry Christmas.”