by Barbara A. Clark

Created on: December 23, 2007

Bird Watching

When I was a kid, I used to love watching nature, and particularly birds. It was a strange love affair really, as I also had some bad experiences with several birds as a kid and a teenager. I was attacked by a blue jay while I was riding my bike because I unknowingly came too close to her fallen nest, and several years later, a trained crow perched itself on my back when I was on a high school Spanish class trip in Mexico. The experiences left me with a feeling of keeping my distance from those types of birds and I never wanted nor asked for birds as "pets," preferring always cats or dogs.

Yet I've always been fascinated by birds, mainly preferring the large, majestic birds such as hawks and eagles or the tiniest of birds such as the hummingbird and small Jenny wrens. Aside from blue jays and crows, I absolutely loved nature and being outdoors and used to spend hours on end just observing the hawks in the sky with their wings spread out wide, gliding through the sky like an artist painting a new masterpiece, or robins in my yard searching, pecking for worms as food for their young. I was a member of the Audubon Society and used to be able to correctly identify birds from my studies as a kid. I would spend hours looking for birds and trying to find as many different types as I could.

Then city life introduced me to pigeons. I have to admit that I was not particularly fond of them, as I had often heard that they were like "rats with wings," and carry disease. At the same time, there has always been something intriguing about them as they reminded me of doves, which are symbols of peace to me. I've since learned that pigeons are related to doves and have often been referred to as "rock doves." Still, you won't find me feeding them as I don't really want them to get that close, just in case.

A couple of days ago I was walking across a university campus where there is a small space as a memorial for the victims who died on September 11, 2001. Two pieces of the Twin Towers form part of that space. Next to the towers on the grass were a group of pigeons. Before I could look away, they immediately took off in flight, together, in unison, swooping over my head twice, circling around the trees, their tight unit sounding like shutters that ever so gently knock on the windowsill as if to say, "Will you please let me in?" At one point in their dance, two of them split from the group, surrounding the flock on either side, as if they were the grown-up chaperons

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