Late Spring Avian Revery

There is no heaven like a breezy late spring morning in Virginia, he decides, especially a clear morning after days of rain, when all is washed clean, the sun bright, slanting in from the east, and the trees proud in their new foliage spreading dappled shade across an unruly lawn. When he opens the front door to let the dog out, that refreshing breeze welcomes him forward to the porch, and draws him down to a lawn chair, just as the morning’s aerial pageant seems to have reached some operatic peak.

A pair of mourning doves confer briefly on a power line, then sail forward, suede tails fanned, swooping past to their day. High up, tiny swallows swerve, foraging for their flying insect breakfast. A flash of red at the neighbor’s azalea, a cardinal diving for its hidden nest. The bluebirds have returned, just this week, to tend the season’s second brood in the battered old birdhouse atop a metal pole in the side yard. He spies the male perched on the power line, then the female careens in from on high to alight atop the roof, smooth her lovely blue feathers, then scuttle down to the hole and fold herself inside.

At his ear and out of the corner of his eye, a green hummingbird with a shiny red throat has magically appeared. He turns his head oh so slowly, so as not to spook it, and enjoys its helicoptering at the feeder, its needle beak sipping a moment before it veers off so swiftly it might have simply vanished. In the yard, meanwhile, finches with ruddy breasts bicker at the birdseed feeder. Far off a crow caws. He glimpses a gray mockingbird, hooded nuthatches, a busy wren sharing the maple at his shoulder. The breeze on the porch is seductive, the light brilliant now, and as the caffeine kicks in, alert to this hitherto unattended aviary, a mild exaltation rises in his breast, that quickening awareness of the immediate present, its languid vibrancy, that comes and goes as it will. This may be what these feathered creatures live and feel always, he imagines. Their brilliance in flight, their coded song, their elegant palm-sized beauty vivid icons of this just briefly attainable now.

And then, a quick brown flash at the corner of his eye, a flutter in the brush and a horrible mammalian squeal of distress, the foliage at that spot fluttering as the desperate squawking rises then ebbs weakly to silence. He gets up and walks across the yard to that bush, crouches to peer under it, but what must have been a cooper’s hawk has already escaped back through the woods with its prey, no doubt the little bunny they’ve seen for weeks now nibbling in the yard. There it is, he thinks, gob-smacked, nature red in tooth and claw, another kind of suddenness, the finger snap awaiting us all.