Notes From My Knapsack 5-13-07
Jeff Gill

Tread Carefully On the Earth

So I’m walking backwards, slowly.

Warblers, cardinals, towhees, robins, all keeping up a steady symphony.

There’s a bird on a high branch of a nearby tulip poplar (yellow poplar, tulip tree, Ohio sequoia, whatever). The leaves are just past buds but not yet big and green enough to be anything other than springtime in two dimensions. And there’s a blue to the sky, behind the leaf and branch filigree, that we may not see again until fall, dry air and steady light spreading cerulean overhead.

A cedar waxwing had just coasted past me, tan and black accents, swooping up into a tree nearby. Truth be told, I’m not sure what a cedar waxwing’s song sounds like, even if I could spot their size and coloration from a township away.

This song is repetitive, but fairly musical; nicer than a starling, not quite a red winged blackbird trill. Somewhere above me, some forty or fifty feet, the bird is bouncing from branch to branch, and I want a clear look at whether this is my waxwing from a few minutes ago, or . . .

It turns out to be a Northern Flicker, also tan but with a dramatic red hood thrown back on his neck, but he’s singing and not pounding his tiny little head into the bark. That I hear him doing later in a mating display (listen to me build a home and hunt the bugs, ladies!).

What people don’t always seem to appreciate is how flexible you’d better keep your neck for birding. Birders may not be noted as Olympic athletes exactly, but along with an inhuman indifference to finding a comfort station for hours on end, they’re known for usually keeping their necks loose and mobile.

Walking backwards is also a useful skill in birding. Or for any outdoor activity. There’s giving tours to kids at a Licking Park District site, or around Dawes Arboretum, or as I was, at Flint Ridge State Memorial for the Ohio Historical Society. Even on your own, when a songbird has perched just behind you, up high, and often against the sun’s contrast, you don’t regret (much) all the time you’ve spent walking hindways.

Spring is a great time to watch birds and wander through forests, not yet too overgrown with underbrush, trying to figure out what that sunny shadow up three levels of branch is.

Sometimes, birds come to you whether you’re looking for them or not. Bird’s nests in the doorway, or animal adventures mixed with the gunpowder of curious children.

I had recently been looking up some information on William S. Denison, the namesake of a local university. His family migrated here from near Mystic, Connecticut, where the Denison Homestead is still standing and a noted area attraction, after the Mystic Seapot and, certainly, Mystic Pizza.

(And none of this can be confused with the local Denison Homestead program in Granville, which is having a 30th anniversary along with Commencement Weekened!)

There is also a nature center tied to the area of the 1717 Denison house, called the Denison Pequotsepos Nature Center. Their website has a “FAQ” page on wild animals and particularly birds that is the best I’ve seen about anywhere: what to do or not do with them, and so on.

The website is http://www.dpnc.org/faq.html, and you can learn all the average outdoor wanderer needs starting there.
Congratulations to the ancestral Denison home in Connecticut for 290 years, and the environmentally-oriented community living experiment for college students in Ohio, celebrating 30 years. May they all have blue skies and singing birds and many years before them!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio who knows that there’s a bird related reason to those medieval funny hats they wear at graduation ceremonies. Tell him about a cool bird you saw (or thought you saw) in Licking County at knapsack77@gmail.com.