Birds and windows

This morning, between printing off copies of essays I need to edit for a/b:Auto/Biography Studies, which thanks to John Underwood will have a new website this week, and making myself a bowl of raisin bran (and trying to keep it from the cat), I hear a thud at the front door. Blue barks, then points at something on the stoop.

Yellow breasted, black billed, about four inches long. On its back, twitching. With the cats out.

It's a pine warbler. I pick it up, hold it for a while trying to find a place to set it so it won't get eaten while it shakes off its stupor. I lay it in the mulch under the rosemary bush. It blends in so well with the pine straw and chipped wood I can hardly see it. From the window I watch it as best as I can, given how the pattern of its feathers shifts it into and out of sight from moment to moment. Right now it's sitting up a little better, breathing more steadily, blinking and looking around. I think it's going to be okay.

When I heard it, I thought it was a ruby-throated hummingbird (this, by the way, is a decent link to birding blogs if you're into them). We have about half a dozen fighting over the feeders out there, and sometimes they're so intense they forget about everything, hit the windows, roll around like angry siblings on the walk. It's crazy. They're desperate, of course, trying to get fat enough to fly to Mexico in a month.

I heard a pileated woodpecker in the neighbor's dead slash pine while I was holding the warbler; also a hawk of some sort. The brown thrasher and the rest of the birds we get at the grain feeders were all huddled under the underbrush, I could see them waiting and watching, one eye on me, one eye on the sky with the hawk hung in it like a hank of black wool.

It might rain today. The air feels heavy and still, like something's about to happen.