Every year in mid May small yellow birds (which I’ve figured out are at least two kinds of warblers) make a brief appearance in my backyard. Their bright feathers and musical song contrast with the modest browns and plane chirps of the usual backyard crowd. I always enjoy seeing them, and somewhere in the back of my mind I knew they may have migrated a long way to get here, but the epic quality of their journey never really hit me until I heard bird researcher Bridget Strutchbury speak last month.

Strutchbury, author of Silence of the Songbirds, spoke about the double life of songbirds who winter in Central and South America and breed in the north, the huge “storms” of birds migrating north each year (flying mostly at night), and the alarming decline in the numbers of breeding birds (a drop of 30-50% since 1965).

That little yellow bird passing through my backyard has faced loss of its tropical forest winter home, been forced to survive in scrubby left-over habitat, dodged toxic agricultural pesticides (often pesticides restricted or banned in the north), then flown the long gruelling route north with fewer places to stop and city lights disrupting night-time navigation, then arrived in the north to find breeding forests and grasslands smaller and closer to cities and farms where predators such as crows, jays and feral cats lurk.

Put in this light, the fact that these little yellow birds have even made it to my yard at all is pretty amazing. I find it really distrubing to think that one spring they might not. If this happens it wont just mean the disappearance of birdsong from our neighbourhoods. Strutchbury points out: “If a species goes extinct or its  population drops to very low numbers, the ecological roles that it played in nature are lost. Some species are so specialized that their services can no be replaced by other animals, so their loss creates a ripple effect. . . . Their jobs as pollinators, fruit-eaters, insect-eaters, scavengers and nutrient recyclers will not get done, and this will disrupt ecosystems and affect everyone on the planet.”

Things we can do to help save the songbirds:

– drink shade-grown coffee

– buy organic produce (especially from Latin America)

– create backyard habitats

– keep lawns pesticide-free

– turn city lights out at night

– keep cats indoors

– buy recycled paper products

– buy wood products certified by the Forest Stewardship Council

– pressure companies manufacturing pesticides to meet international standards

scent of blossoms

lures me down one more street

lightens my feet

first sunny weekend

for once the crows are silent

beaks full of nest twigs

sunlit seagulls sail

across a blue sea of sky

beacons of light

About noon today I decided to take a break from writing and go out for a Starbucks hot chocolate. I just missed the bus, which was frustrating, and had to walk to the Skytrain. Half way there, I looked up to see a bald eagle circling low in the blue sky (yes, blue sky, not gray and rainy). The eagle continued to circle above me the whole rest of my walk. Eagle sightings always feel significant — like you’ve been honored by their presence or they’re markers of something important that’s happening or about to happen…. At the very least, they remind us to pay attention…. And if I hadn’t missed the bus, I would have missed this one.

I am a bad birdwatcher. This is a good thing, according to Simon Barnes, the author of How to Be a Bad Birdwatcher (Short Books 2004), a great book I recently discovered.

Barns says “I don’t go bird watching. I am birdwatching.” It’s simply part of who he is in the world. He notices birds. Anyone can do this. You don’t have to carry around any special equipment or even know the names of all the birds you see. If you can tell a car from a truck, you can tell a swan from a robin. And that’s enough.

Why bother? As Barnes says, “looking at birds is one of life’s greatest pleasures. Looking at birds is a key: it opens doors, and if you choose to go through them you find you enjoy life more and understand life better.”

Barnes tells the story of how he was walking to a London train station one day and paused to watch a bunch of house martins “whizzing round” a church steeple and catching flies in their beaks.

“And then it happened. Bam!”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw what he at first took to be a kestrel in the sky. It suddenly dropped like a thunderbolt into the crowd of martins, took one out, then vanished. Barnes stood on the street, looking up, “uttering incredulous obscenities and prayerful blasphemies.” It was a falcon (specifically, a hobby, but being able to identify it, says Barnes, was not necessary — only a bonus). Not a rare bird or a sighting that would make any headlines in birdwatching journals — “just a wonderful and wholly unexpected sight of a wonderful and wholly unexpected bird. . . a moment of perfect drama.”

Something similar happened to me several years ago when I was a student at York University in Toronoto. I was walking across campus after an Environemntal Studies class when my eye was caught by a movement above a roof-top crowded with pigeons. Something dropped out of the sky, hit the pigeons like an explosion, then was gone. A peregrine falcon. It was like a piece of a nature documentary playing out right in front of me.

I looked around quickly to see if anyone else had seen what I’d just seen. Out of the large group of students walking between buildings, only one other stood still and was excitedly looking around to see if anyone else had seen what he’d just seen. It was a guy from my class who knew birds. Our eyes connected.

“That was a peregrine falcon!” he called across the crowd (this is the only reason I knew for sure what type of bird it was). At that time the peregrine falcon was still on the endangered species list and had been almost wiped out a decade or so earlier due to the pesticide DDT. So, to see a peregrine falcon in action right here in the middle of the city was not only to witness a marvelous  moment of natural drama, but also to experience a sense of wonder and hope.

I haven’t seen a peregrine falcon since then (though I may have without knowing it), and most of my bird sightings are quite calm and ordinary ones (bush tits outside my kitchen window, crows, etc.), but somehow when I catch sight of a bird (especially one I’m not expecting), it’s like glimpsing magic in the world. “Enhanced enjoyment of the ordinary” is what Simon Barnes calls it.

Who needs drugs when you have birds?

[Note: below is a hummingbird at my sister’s feeder on southern Vancouver Island (during our December snowfall), juncos at a pine cone feeder in my backyard, and Sandhill cranes at the Riefel Bird sanctuary near where I live]