Daily it gifts me with indifferent but beautiful Nature. My haphazard encounters there include deer, fox, coyote, red-tailed and chicken hawks, as well as the smaller animals these predators prey on. I saw the larger hawk take a big gray squirrel off the ground just the other day. It flew off with the heavyweight at my approach, as if I might fight her for the warm carcass.
The bird knew — and it's true — that I am a predator, feeding on what I can snatch from my walks. Between two massive steel poles, four ugly power lines support black birds, which are as "lovely as notes on a musical score," a line I find in a poem I wrote years ago. I suspect the quotes around it mean I had read it somewhere. These birds have returned too early, tricked, like the daffodils, into this frigid exposure.
With birds on my mind, my eyes dart over the bare limbs, thinking of the Baltimore orioles' arrival. Although it's too early for them now, I remember that a pair has hung around here for years. Last fall, I met a birder with an expensive telescopic camera searching the upper limbs of ash and cottonwood trees for an oriole. He could identify it by its call but couldn't find it in his lens. The leaves were beginning to change — the bird's bright orange would have been hard to spot among the colored foliage.
Once in this park I saw a pair of indigo buntings that stayed for a week. Likewise two bluebirds I spotted two days in a row, resting, maybe stopped mid-migration to consider nesting in the trees that line these large open fields. The golf carts and clacking power mowers were probably too frightening: the fields are holes 16 and 17 of the Community Golf Course. Maybe the lack of proper nesting boxes drove them off.
Which reminds me how lucky I was to have been spared my friend's experience. Cleaning out bluebird nesting boxes at the Aullwood Audubon Center, she found 23 bluebirds huddled inside a single box, frozen en masse when a late cold snap — worse than this one — dropped temperatures below their tolerance.