Bird Songs

Guest Essay by master farmer and teacher of future farmers Ken Dawson of Cedar Grove, North Carolina

Red Sky at Sunrise, photo by Ken Dawson

Cardinals are hard to count. The flock that comes to feed around my house is constantly in motion. For some years, it has been my habit, during the colder months, to spread seed on the deck railing and then sit in my hot tub and watch as the birds come and feed. These handsome red birds squabble over position on the railing and move back and forth into the over-hanging limbs of maple and hickory. Of course, I have no idea how many individual cardinals come to breakfast as they move in and out of sight, but most mornings, I can count up to 8 or 10 at a time within a few feet of the porch, and occasionally as many as 14.

I’ve never considered myself a “birder,” but I have been a lifelong observer of birds. My interest goes back as far as I can remember. When I was a child, my sisters and I had a child’s record player that played little yellow records. My favorite was one titled “Birdsongs.”  On it, a human voice would say, “the bluebird,” and then the bluebird would sing his song. “The wren,” and then the wren sang. I knew them all, and when, in first grade, we were asked to make lists of our favorite things, including our favorite record album, mine was bird songs. Before I could read the words, I could name all the birds by sight in a big book with pictures and descriptions of birds, reptiles, minerals, and mammals in the house.

When I was in 4th grade, as a school project, we had to make a little booklet on a favorite topic. Mine was a book on birds, with little write-ups and drawings of about a dozen birds. Most of my drawings were actually tracings of pictures from other sources and were noticeably better than my sketches. I dedicated the book to my parents and am forever grateful they supported and encouraged my interest in books, model birds, etc.

Model cars and airplanes were popular among boys my age in the late ‘50s and ‘60s. They came as kits of plastic parts to be assembled and displayed. I had model birds. The parts were snapped together and color-coded so that a kid could paint them in realistic color patterns using the paint supplied in the kits. Mine were mounted on the walls of my room. When we moved away from Richmond when I was 12, I had to leave behind an entire bookshelf full of bird nests I had collected.

Thirty-five years ago, during the summer that we were looking at this farm before we bought it, a big concern of mine was how few birds I would see when I came here to walk about. Turns out, there is little to interest a bird in a tobacco field. It also turns out that “if you build it, they will come.” Over the years since, we have transformed the farm into a bird sanctuary, planting fields of grass, planting trees and shrubs and berry bushes, growing crops of vegetables and herbs and berries and flowers, foregoing the use of insecticides that kill the insects that so many birds feed upon. Now we find wren nests in the greenhouses, under the eaves of my house, under the hood of a tractor. Phoebe nests under the outbuilding shed roofs, mockingbird nests in the grape vines, sparrow nests in trellised cucumber vines, and indigo bunting nests in eggplant bushes. Bluebirds and tree swallows raise their broods in houses I built for them.

Dozens of birds roost at night in the hedge of hollies I planted 30 years ago and where the orchard orioles nest every summer. Hawks feed on rats in our fields of grass, and the summer tanagers fly all the way here from their wintering grounds in Central America to feed on our blueberries in July. Wood thrushes fly from Belize to feed and nest in our woods. Every spring, a hummingbird shows up after his winter in the tropics and hovers in the exact spot where our hummingbird feeder hung the season before. Miraculous! That tiny bird has flown so far to get right back here to our farm. Amazing.

In the back of my Peterson’s Field Guide to Birds of the Eastern US (large print version) is a list of all the birds described in the book. I have checked off all the species I have identified here at the farm in the past 34 years, either by sight or sound or, in recent years, with the Merlin app on my phone. The list now stands at exactly 100. Of course, they’re never all here at the same time. The year-round residents include the common cardinals, bluejays, titmice, and chickadees. There are those that come to nest in the summer and go south for the winter, such as the indigo buntings, summer tanagers, hummingbirds, and wood thrush. Some nest farther north and winter here, such as the white-throated sparrows and hermit thrushes. Some live in the region and occasionally pass by, such as bald eagles, great white egrets, and ospreys. There are those that I have only occasionally spotted as they migrate from their wintering grounds to their summer nesting places, such as great, talkative flocks of bobolinks and the tiny, hard-to-spot warblers of numerous descriptions. There are ducks, such as the buffleheads and hooded mergansers, that occasionally show up on our pond for a few days at a time during the winter. There are those that I have never seen but heard, such as the great horned owl calling far off in the night. I also saw rare birds, such as the woodcock, which I had only seen twice in all these years.

There are 14 species of birds that I see at my feeders daily – cardinals, bluejays, doves, red-bellied woodpeckers, titmice, chickadees, nuthatches, juncos, white-throated sparrows, chipping sparrows, Carolina wrens, goldfinches, purple finches and one little pine warbler, the only species of warbler I am aware of that winters in this area; there always seems to be one around here in the winter—the flocks of feeding sparrows and finches often number in the dozens at a time. Cardinals are numerous, too, but hard to count.