Nests, Empty and Otherwise

Now that we have had a few years as "empty nesters," Joan and I have mysteriously become interested in bird watching. While we have regular contact with our now 20 and 25 year olds, since they "flew the coop," our schedule and our brains seem to have a little more room for things that we long ago said we would do "some day."

While I have made feeble attempts to hang bird feeders over the years, it was usually only during the coldest months, and I was not as faithful at keeping them full as our resident cardinals and jays would have liked. Now I have put a suet feeder and a mixed food feeder precisely where I can watch them all day, much to my delight and the gratitude of my flighty and furry friends. Yes, the squirrels are also the beneficiary of my new found generosity, and they have become adept at gaming the system, skillfully capturing the uneaten spoils within seconds of them hitting the ground.

Many of my friends are probably wondering how a one-time rabid vegetarian could possibly be feeding suet to birds. Well, if there is anything my mother, and mother-in law, have taught me, is that some birds need suet. And the same holds true for the birds in our neighborhood.

During visits to our parents this spring,  Joan and I were reminded once again where we learned to care about birds,  and we were able to share a new iPad app with bird calls. "So that is a chickadee!" I exclaimed ..."yeah, the one that has been greeting the day waaay too early, " Joan reminded me.

While we have occasionally had hummingbirds around our yard, our moms seem to have become foster parents to whole generations. I have dutifully hung a feeder up, but don't expect them to be swarming it any time soon. At my moms house this May they regularly landed on porch railings a few feet from where I lounged, so oblivious to my presence that I was able to capture a great image on my phone. We have some hummingbird attracting plants in our garden, but we seem to do a better job of attracting much larger fowl to the back side of our third-acre city lot.  At times we have had Great Blue Herons and red tail hawks fish out of our postage stamp size pond, and as happened recently, Joan looked up from one of our first el fresco deck dinners just in time to see a female mallard splash down. While we are used to seeing these species in our river town there is something spectacular about them getting up close and personal!

Speaking of up close and personal, our bird feeding experience almost became a productive possibility this past spring as some of us petitioned Council for a fine-tuning of Kent's overly restrictive livestock ordinance in order to allow backyard hen-keeping. ClucKent, the advocacy group that is working on the issue, wasn't able to get it out of council committee the first time through. While some of us were surprised that some people would be so opposed to something that has been a basic part of city life since civilization began, we only came up just one vote short. Like in many communities, it might take a few more months, but we'll get there. After all, it used to be patriotic to keep hens, Uncle Sam promoting it widely in the World War II.  If patriotism means protecting our home land, hen tending will be a normal part of life for most of us in the decades ahead as cheap fossil fuel becomes fully accounted for and we need to start paying for our wars by personal sacrifice once again.

Being an "empty nester" certainly has its privileges in terms of more flexibility and opportunities for leisure. It also also means that we have a little more time to give a little more attention to the future of "civilization as we know it" — beyond investments in our own progeny. Getting to better know and care for our fine feathered friends will certainly be an important part of the life of our household in the days ahead.