Looking Out: Taking a moment to appreciate the birds

When the bird feeder is empty, it falls to me to fill it.

The birds never express gratitude. They just eat and eat and eat.

I walk across my yard to the feeder. About ten feet away, I stop because there is a house finch on the feeder enjoying his lunch of sunflower seeds.

There he sits on the perch by one of the feeder’s holes, eating one seed after another.

I wait for him to finish, but he lingers.

Taking a couple of steps forward, I assume he’ll fly away. He doesn’t. He eats.

Two more steps. Two more. Still, he eats.

Now my nose is just a foot away from my reddish little friend. He keeps eating. I hold very still as I’m enjoying seeing the glutton from such a short distance.

Suddenly, a chickadee comes to the feeder, landing on a perch only 8” from my eyes.

She grabs a seed and flits off to crack it and eat it in a nearby tree. This lasts 10 seconds and then she is back. The finch is not bothered by the chickadee, and I’m enjoying the show.

Alas, it is cold outside and I’m not wearing a jacket or gloves. My friends and family won’t believe this, but I’m getting cold.

Here I am, starting to shiver while I watch two tiny birds eat seeds.

Come to think of it, not only am I cold, but I’m also hungry. My gustatory preferences do not run to raw sunflower seeds from a bag of bird seed. Nor do they run to little songbirds.

“Sorry,” I say out loud and the two birds take off. I take the feeder down and put it on the ground between my feet, then fill it with a fresh load of seeds.

Back inside, I quickly warm up and peel a clementine, which goes down the hatch quickly, followed by a toasted English muffin. As I prepare and eat my simple lunch I look out the window at the bird feeder.

Lots of birds are coming and going. Cardinals, blue jays, a downy woodpecker, plenty of house finches, and chickadees.

House finches are fairly new to this part of the country. Southwestern birds, they were trapped and sold as pets in New York, which was illegal. The pet shop owners, sensing a crackdown on the illegal trade, released the house finches, which did just fine in the northeast.

That was in 1940, according to the Audubon Society. The pretty little birds thrived and began spreading westward, year after year, eventually getting to Michigan and beyond until they met up with their kin in the middle of the country. Now they are everywhere.

That’s OK with me, particularly if they are going to let me join them for lunch at the feeder. One other condition: They’re going to have to get used to me eschewing sunflower seeds in favor of English muffins and clementines.

— Jim Whitehouse lives in Albion.

This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Looking Out: Taking a moment to appreciate the birds