Singing a Song of Love

Like a warrior I am fighting to reclaim my time.  The quick sands of volunteerism slurp away at my ankles and I find I must use both hands to find a guiltless hold and step away firmly and walk to the knoll at the crest of the hill.  I live with someone for whom being busy is the same thing as breathing, and thus, I must dance alone some days.  For me watching the morning unfold and pruriently watching the evening undressing for bed is what fills up my breath and banks my fire.

On this early lime-green spring morning after the buckets of rain, I can still hear that male prothonotary calling and calling for his love.  His ardor is a little weaker, but the drive for reproduction is compelling.  He is not shy around us hopping from branch to branch at the edges where the woods meet the yard in his desperation to find that mate.   He even pauses at the top of our broken umbrella, looking for love in all the wrong places.

He is so handsome and has checked out several of the bird houses in between his arias.  He even started to bring mosses to the little woven bird house that hangs beneath my rain monitor on the front porch forcing us to use another door for our access to this house.

I feel like a matchmaker wanting to find him the lady of his dreams, and truly am a failure as I have no power in that venture.  We all want to help when there is that longing for love and companionship in a fellow living being, don't we?

There was a brief carnival-of-color conversation yesterday when an indigo bunting came by to sing and landed not far from the bright yellow prothonotary on the fence line.  They chattered back and forth ever so sharply.  I was holding back my dismay until I saw his brownish/gray mate perching nearby and relieved that he at least is getting some loving this spring.

The dots in the photos above are their wedding confetti thrown from the blossoms of the wild cherry trees.

The bunting navigates from its winter home in Central America by using the stars at night just like a sailor.  Both the prothonotary and indigo bunting are not strangers to the woods in this area, but they are truly novel things to see in my yard.  Is this my reward trying to use natural controls and natural methods in my gardens?

I read that the bunting is not really blue but reflects blue light from microscopic structures in his feathers.  Are not birds miracles and mysteries in so many ways? 

I am hanging on to these next few weeks with tenacity, since all too soon the song birds will have nested, raised their young, and moved into the far woods for their quieter summer lives and will be much harder to find and watch.