Looking Inward

When I sit on my enclosed back porch, I am usually in my favorite old chair in the corner. I can look to my left and see the feeders but my back is to two of the surrounding houses and I try not to look too much at the third house. When I sit on my porch it is to get away from people and not think about the things I must do such as work. Generally, I am sitting there to listen to the birds in the morning, get some sun on my face as I have my first cup of coffee and let my mind wander.

Porch plants in summer (Margo D. Beller)

Today is a gray, foggy, rainy day, making it easy to look inward and ponder life and death. I am facing surgery this week and trying to keep a positive attitude.

Thanks to the coronavirus, I have a lot of time to look within, maybe too much. I have been spending most of my time at home. On days when I should be walking I sit on the porch and listen. I can find in my backyard many of the same birds I'd find elsewhere. Sometimes something unusual will fly overhead, such as a great blue heron or a raven. I can see or hear these through a porch window or if I stand just outside on the patio.

I have always kept to myself, now even more so. I wave at neighbors, they wave back but we don't socialize. People walking in the street make sure they are on the other side of the road if I am walking along. When I go around the block, I am usually more nervous on the one side of the oval that is on a sidewalked street because there anyone approaching prompts a quandary: Do I walk into the street as we pass or will that person? It is easier to walk on my U-shaped street where there are no sidewalks and I can see my house as I approach.

Looking toward the back of the house from my 
corner chair (Margo D. Beller)

From my corner chair I look at the back of my house. But when the weather is consistently warm I will have plants on the porch to keep me company. These plants don't need a lot of direct light and will appreciate the humidity after a dry winter in my front room. It is not that time yet. 

I also look at a row of empty pots in another corner of the porch. They remind me I have cannas to divide and dahlias to plant, plus a small pepper plant and a tomato to put into bigger pots and move outside. 

From my chair I can see the house feeder. Usually
in May rosebreasted grosbeaks pass through. 
These two are males. I hope to
see more this year. (Margo D. Beller)

Spring is a busy time for me. Besides the plants there are the northbound migrants I would like to see and hear, perhaps birds I have not found for quite some time. It is harder for my husband (MH) and me to hike rocky or hilly trails nowadays. Paths should be reasonably flat and, preferably, paved to save balky knees. This can be limiting but I enjoy MH's company and he is helpful in finding snakes and things on the ground while I am scanning the treetops.

I am looking ahead to that time when we can go out more and not worry about who is near us and whether we have on masks. I'm even looking at the compost pile, which hasn't been turned in too long, with some degree of expectation. But mostly I'm looking within, wondering if I have everything arranged in case the worst happens. As I said, I'm trying to stay positive, but it is not easy. 

Putting Things in Order

When February's snows finally receded in March, I could no longer ignore the devastation of last winter. Branches of shrubs were bent low. Fence posts were askew. Some of the deer netting had been pulled down under the snow's weight or pushed up by hungry deer looking for any food they could find.

March 2021 (Margo D. Beller)

When the snow was gone and the weather became unusually warm for March it was time to put things in order.

All of the plants are perennials and can take care of themselves. Once the snow was gone, the snowdrops and crocuses popped up, albeit a month late. When the temperature jumped into the upper 60s and low 70s, these faded but the daffodils and irises, which had been poking their noses up from the soil, jumped out and, in the case of the daffs, are blooming. Several types of weeds have also come up with no help from me, and a few dandelions are blooming between the cracks in the paving stones on the front walk.

The apple and pear trees plus the shrubs are now either leafing or blooming. To some the bright pink of the quince may look garish next to the yellow of the forsythia in the backyard but I don't mind it at all.

There is more birdsong: cardinals, robins, song sparrows. I am now hearing chipping sparrows and chipmunks, the former welcomed for its dry trill, the latter not so much because of the digging they do even behind the deer netting.

Hellebore. Since I took this
picture it is now flowering.
(Margo D. Beller)

But there are things that need human attention. The butterfly bush and liriope needed to be cut back in early March and are now growing again. Same with the dried ornamental grasses I hacked down and now showing green growth. At some point I have dahlias to pot and cannas to divide. 

Finally, there was the fencing. After the deer found a weakness in the netting and were able to nearly destroy the euonymous bushes in front yet again, I cut everything back, reinforced and tied the netting and fastened it down with garden "staples." Had I known what to expect when I put in these yellow and green evergreen shrubs, I'd have put in something less appetizing to deer.

The area most in need of repair, however, was in back where I cover the netting with burlap to protect the yew shrubs behind. Out of sight, out of trouble is my motto. With these shrubs are other plants that don't need a lot of sun including two pots of hostas I took in for a friend and a hellebore that has bloomed despite the soil being more acidic than it would like. The joe-pyes grow here, as do a pot of perennial geranium, coral bells that attract hummingbirds and a few fringed bleeding hearts.

Repurposing the garden hose
(Margo D. Beller)

It was a job that took many hours because I had to cut back the yews and remove debris from the potted plants. Then the burlap had to be removed, the garden staples pulled up and the deer netting untied or cut off. New netting was put on (doubled above and below) the posts that I thought weren't too bent or shredded from use. I took new, thick garden ties to secure it above and many more garden staples to do the same below. It is both aggravating and calming work that allows me to be outside and listening to the birds.

Finally, I took the old garden hose and put it in to block an opening. Many years ago, a deer got behind the netting and then tried to leave. I woke up to find half the netting was in the yard. Luckily, that was the day I had planned to put in new posts anyway. More recently, a doe put her newborn fawn in back. I had to pull up the posts to let it out. Around that time we got a new hose and so the old one became a deer barrier. (The other end is close to a leader pipe so I can tie the netting to it.)

It is a good feeling to put things in order. When it becomes really hot and things start to overgrow the neatness will disappear. Soon my husband (MH) and I will have to bring out the canna and dahlia pots and get them behind the netting somehow. Weeds will fill the spaces between the plants and create a green carpet I don't need along the walkways. For now I enjoy this feeling of accomplishment when I look at my handiwork.

Backyard daffodils, 2020 (Margo D. Beller)

Nowadays I am putting other things in order, in my life. I will be having cancer surgery in the coming week, a repeat of surgery I had five years ago. I am five years older now, survived a visit to the emergency room because of blood clots and am living in a time when the coronavirus pandemic shows no signs of ending, even with more people (including me) getting vaccinated. I can be hopeful I come through but there is always that possibility something will go wrong. So I am making lists for MH and talking, virtually and via social media, to good friends and family ahead of time. I am writing here. 

Daffodils are blooming, birds are singing. There is so much more to be done. I am looking ahead, but not too far.

Corvid Conversations

The other morning I went out to hang the bird feeders and heard a soft, repetitive call that turned out to be a male goldfinch, molting into his bright yellow and black breeding plumage, high atop a tree in my yard singing to a female high in a tree at the front curb. She, too, was changing into breeding plumage - from winter brown to yellow and green to better blend into the foliage while on her nest. I was eavesdropping on pair bonding.

This morning, I eavesdropped on something very different. This was not pair bonding but a loud conversation, such as what I hear when people are running or bicycling together, to the point of being aggravating. I was on my back porch and was hearing fish crows - eight of them, as it turned out - atop another yard tree. This was not the angry or alarmed cawing of crows when a hawk is in the vicinity. This was just crow talk - a short, nasal caw that sounds like "uh-uh." After a while they flew off to another tree and them eventually left the area. 

Fish crow, Cape May, NJ, 2011 (RE Berg-Anderson)

Crows, of the corvid family, are social creatures. Where you see one, you'll usually see (and hear) more, sometimes in very large flocks. In that way they are similar to their cousins the blue jays, which also travel in noisy family groups.

In my part of the world there are two kinds of crows. There is the American crow and the smaller fish crow. The American is what we think of when we see a "crow" - large, raucous, chasing predators or other, unwanted creatures away, ripping apart garbage bags for what's inside.

As the name implies, the fish crow can be found near water. That is where I saw my first one many years ago. These all-black birds are otherwise hard to differentiate from the American crow unless you hear them or see the two types together - the American is always larger. (Their cousin the raven is larger still.)

That I am seeing and hearing fish crows at all in my neighborhood is a relatively recent, semi-disturbing phenomenon.

All crows are omnivores, meaning they'll eat anything from berries to garbage to dead chipmunks. They are active in the morning when they are hungriest. That is when you will hear them the loudest as they scope out easy to access food sources.

It may not look like it, but jays are related to the corvid
family. (Margo D. Beller)

When I was a kid growing up in coastal Brooklyn, I knew that if I saw gulls whirling in the skies above my house there must be a storm approaching, forcing the birds inland. Now that I live much farther inland, I see gulls all the time. These gulls have learned it is much easier to dive into the open dumpster behind a fast-food place than to fly over the open ocean looking for fish.

The fish crows have learned this, too.

In my area there are several distinct groups of fish crows clustered in the vicinity of food places with lots of garbage going into the dumpsters. The group closest to my house, which centers itself on the local Quik-Chek, sometimes flies along a brook that flows behind the neighbors' houses across the street. These are the ones I hear in the morning, particularly on garbage pickup day. There is another, larger group that hangs out in an area on the edge of town where they can fight the gulls to pick from the dumpsters behind a supermarket on one corner, a fast-food place on another corner and a shopping mall including several food places on a third. (A restaurant is going up on the fourth corner.)

So the crows, like the gulls, are following the garbage because members of the corvid family are very smart and they know where the pickings are easiest and most fruitful. Suburbia provides lots of favorable habitat conditions, including abundant food.

Take the fish crow pictured above. My husband (MH) and I were in Cape May, NJ, one September and I heard a fish crow calling outside our motel room. I looked out the window and there it was, perched on the railing. I opened the door. It did not fly off. In fact, it looked at me with what I would say was a very human look of expectation. MH took its picture. It still didn't fly off. We realized it was sitting on the railing of our balcony room waiting for us to provide its breakfast, the way many other occupants of this room (and perhaps others) had been doing possibly for generations. 

Even though this crow was literally within sight of the Atlantic Ocean, it was waiting for us to serve it. We went back inside and eventually it flew to another railing where maybe the occupant would be more generous. 

Fish crow on the beach with laughing gulls, which also
like to pick garbage out of dumpsters. September 2013
(RE Berg-Andersson)

(There are many reasons I don't feed birds, aside from what I put into feeders in the backyard. You could say I'm selective in what birds I care to feed or that I don't feel the need to show my human mastery over dumb critters, as I see many do. But mainly it is because I know birds like crows will find their own food just fine.) 

Corvids like the fish crow are extremely intelligent. They have large brains capable of memorizing human faces, using tools and solving problems. Young crows will play, swinging from branches or floating in the wind, according to the Cornell Ornithology Lab. They are a species far from threatened by hunting or disease. In fact, their numbers are increasing to the point of them becoming a real pest. Luckily for these crows, they are protected by the Migratory Bird Act even though like the Canada geese - another bird that found suburbia to its taste - they don't exactly migrate in the same way as other types of birds such as warblers.

So what exactly were the fish crows talking about so loudly this morning? They could've been discussing the next place where they could get a meal. They could've been telling another crow I couldn't see to get out of the area. (There was one American crow calling in the distance.) Maybe they were discussing the weather or whether they should go down the shore for a change of pace. Or maybe they were just idly chattering. 

After they left, I started to hear loud human chattering, and that is when I left, too.

Resurfacing

It is hard to believe that a month ago - Valentine's Day - my neighborhood was buried under two feet of snow from the nor'easter Feb. 1. There were several snow storms in February and we were in perpetual white all month. It was only in March the weather started to warm, culminating in one day when the temperature reached nearly 70 degrees F. Now, only the smallest bits of icy snow remain in the shady areas. 

Feb. 22, 2021 (Margo D. Beller)

With the end of the snow, some good and bad things resurfaced.

I looked outside one day and saw one yellow crocus in an area where there should've been more. I quickly yanked away a pot I had put behind the deer netting and there were the rest of them, which had come out of the ground and struggled under the weight of the pot. In a few days they recovered, and with them came some purple crocus. These flowers usually come up in February but were now making up for lost time.

In another bed, the snowdrops - another early bloomer - suddenly appeared and flowered a month late. They are sharing the area with many daffodils, my favorite flowers because of their diversity and their not being palatable to deer or chipmunks. The irises are showing signs of life, as are the rhododendron and the azeleas. The maple trees have started to flower, too.

Those are the good things. But there are also bad.

A deer (I'm pretty sure it was the same one) found a weakness in the netting and devoured every leaf of the yellow and green euonymous bushes. Best as I can figure, a deer put its head through an area not well fastened down the first time. Then, when I fixed that, it got up on its hind legs and pushed the netting down until it could reach over and eat more bushes. Finally, after I fixed that it went around to the side to get the last two it couldn't reach before.

Crocuses, March 14, 2021 (Margo D. Beller)

I went out and chopped the bushes back as far back as I could, something I'll be sure to do next autumn. (I know from experience they will grow back.) The netting has been reinforced and more poles put in to fix what the deer's actions bent. Now there is nothing that will interest a hungry deer until the sedum start to grow.

Let's go back to the good.

While I worked to cut back ornamental grasses and the butterfly bush over the past week I could hear plenty of birds singing or calling - robins, cardinals, a song sparrow, redbellied woodpecker, even one of the earliest migrants, the redwinged blackbird. Very large flocks of grackles flew over, not stopping in my area as they did last February. This morning several skeins of Canada geese were flying north. These are the wild geese, not the ones that have made their home in office parks. Those geese will fly up and around and land, knowing they are supposed to move but not knowing why. The wild geese know the frozen ponds in the north are melting.

Snowdrops (Margo D. Beller)

Now that the snow is gone and the air is warming, more people are walking, and that reminds me I have to get back to walking, too. I did not walk much on my town streets in the cold and the park trails were inaccessible to me because of the deep snow. That snow is now gone, as I discovered this morning. COVID-19 has kept many of us indoors, although we used the cold and snow as an excuse, and so it felt good to walk my favorite trail again to see and hear the birds, not all of which I could've also heard in the backyard.

Finally, now that it is easier for us all to get around, I must take the feeders in at night. It was early one morning at the end of March 2015 I opened my kitchen curtains and saw only one of two feeder poles, the other bent to the ground. I have been bringing the feeders in at night ever since except for when thick snow covers in winter, when the bears should be hibernating. (Six months later, on a warm, sunny, late afternoon, I saw a bear pass through my yard after taking down an arm of the other feeder pole as it tried to take off the house-shaped feeder.) The bears will emerge from their dens hungry and, if a male, seeking new territories. So I'm back to taking feeders in at night.

However, the need to put out feeders in the morning gets me out of bed - resurfacing, you could say - and allows me to hear the birdsong, which will only increase as northbound migrants pass through in the next month. So it's not all bad.

Defoliated shrub (Margo D. Beller)

Count Me Out This Year

The morning after the storm
(Margo D. Beller)

This is the 3-day Presidents Day weekend, and that is when the National Audubon Society and the Cornell Ornithology Lab hold the annual Great Backyard Bird Count. It is meant to encourage people to really look at the birds around them and note how many they are seeing. The data gives the scientists information as to what kinds of birds are increasing in numbers, which are declining and where this is happening.

Most birders enjoy the Count and the counting. They like being "citizen scientists" and use the Count as an excuse to go visit as many places as they can (almost like a winter World Series of Birding), see as many birds as they can and then file their reports. I've done that. But I've also written of how I don't like to count because it makes the birding more like work. 

Well, this year, for the first time in many years, I am not participating in the Count. Why? I'll count out the reasons:

1. I forgot it was going on until late Saturday, about midway through the Friday through Monday period.

2. Because of the 2 feet-plus of snow we've had since early this month I can't walk that easily in the places where I usually look for birds. It's costly to send out a plow crew for a town or county with limited manpower and budget. That's why, for instance, at Greystone, the county park near me, only the main road and some of the paved paths are plowed. The unpaved back areas where I would find all sorts of birds, even in winter, are blocked by piled-up snow mountains.

In another area I hike, Patriots Path, I discovered I could walk in one area but only because some sort of heavy vehicle had driven through, pushing down the snow under heavy treads that helped make walking with my stick a tad easier. But other areas of this linear park were not done, I found. I don't walk in deep or uneven snow anymore. The effort is hard on my lungs and using the stick to keep my balance is hard on my arms and neck.

There was a time when I would joyfully walk in deep snow. Falling into a drift and needing my stick to help get me off my back and on my feet was fun then. It's scarier now. I might not make it back up.

Shoveling the front path, again
(Margo D. Beller)

3. There have not been as many birds at my feeders lately. I thought it was my fault. During autumn there were times I left the feeders inside because of the rain or took them in before dark to keep them from bears. Birds go where there is food. If no food is out they go elsewhere and might not be back.

Before the Feb. 1 nor'easter I made sure the three seed feeders and the suet feeder were filled and outside. After the storm ended I used my shovel and my feet to tamp down a walkable path to the two poles so I could brush the white stuff off the feeders and unblock their openings.

I was sure the snow would bring the birds back in greater numbers than I've seen. Maybe they left for less-snowy areas. Maybe the storms killed them. Or maybe there are more birds visiting than I think. I would not know because...

4. I don't have as much time to spend watching. That might seem strange considering during this time of coronavirus I am working at home, but that is the point. I am in my upstairs office working. I can't sit on my porch all day and wait for the birds, especially when it's quite cold outside. I no longer walk to the train and see or hear birds in my neighborhood in the morning. I no longer look out the train window and see a redtail hawk sitting atop a tree in the sunshine, or the ducks in a Meadowlands impoundment. Now I get up, spend a little time on my porch or in the kitchen and then must get to work.

The birds are on the periphery. I get my breakfast and from the kitchen table I see a male downy woodpecker at the suet, or house finches taking seeds. I sit on the porch in the early morning with my first cup of coffee and see a female cardinal, maybe a titmouse. I hear the churring of a redbellied woodpecker. But I can't stay out there. If I am lucky I can look out the open shade in my office and maybe see a chickadee in the locust tree, or I can hear honking Canada geese as I take a walk at dusk around the block.

And finally...

(RE Berg-Andersson)

5. I just don't feel like it. I have been under a lot of stress. The virus has kept me from traveling, from seeing friends and family. My work has become harder and more tiring, and with no commute I don't have any of the down time where my brain could relax. I go from one job (where I make money to pay the bills) to another (taking care of MH and the household chores). That is why this year, even more so than usual, watching for birds and counting them seems more like work. After being cooped up in the house for five days, on the weekends my inclination is to flee, not sit in the house and wait for anything to come to the feeders. But this weather makes fleeing that much more difficult, and that depresses me. 

That's what nearly a year of pandemic life has done to me.

I wish the snow was gone so I could take longer walks in different places and see more birds. But not now. That will have to wait until the spring.

Dear President Biden:

Hello. Congratulations on your win. I hope you can achieve the unity you mentioned in your inaugural address. As you said, you have many crises on your plate, starting with the coronavirus and its devastating effect on the U.S. economy.

Normally I don't write letters to politicians. I am a bird watcher. But in the waning days of the Trump Administration, the outgoing president did more than pardon his cronies and others. He issued executive orders rolling back some of our long-held environmental regulations.

Mature bald eagle, threatened symbol of our land. (RE Berg-Andersson)

So now that you have issued your own executive order to get us back into the Paris climate accords, here are other Trump orders you should rescind as soon as possible.

An EPA rule that will allow major sources of hazardous air pollutants to reclassify themselves as less regulated "area sources" under the Clean Air Act, abandoning the "once-in, always-in" policy that had been in place for 25 years.

An EPA rule on greenhouse gas emission standards for airplanes that fails to adequately mitigate public health and environmental harms from such emissions, including the environmental justice impacts on residents living near airports, which disproportionately include disadvantaged minority and low-income communities.

An EPA rule maintaining the national ambient air quality standard (NAAQS) for ozone at a level that fails to protect public health and welfare based on the existing scientific evidence.

An EPA rule that will skew how the agency weighs the costs and benefits of rules under the Clean Air Act by excluding important public health benefits from the analysis while inflating the costs. In particular, the rule will cause future EPA rules to undercount the harmful effects of carbon emissions that lead to climate change and distort the value of "co-benefits," the often-substantial benefits of rules that addresses more than one pollutant.

An EPA rule weakening the Clean Air Act's new source review program for major modifications to existing major stationary sources of emissions. The rule will subject New Jersey residents to lower air quality and will make it more difficult for downwind States like New Jersey to attain or maintain federal air quality standards.

An EPA rule that unlawfully and arbitrarily limits the scientific evidence that the agency can consider when adopting rules and standards to protect human health and the environment.

A U.S. Department of Energy rule that will weaken federal energy efficiency standards for consumer appliances and industrial equipment by making it easier for manufacturers to obtain waivers from product testing requirements.

Rules from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service that will make it harder to protect endangered and threatened species by narrowly defining critical "habitat" and establishing a skewed process for excluding areas from critical habitat designations.

A rule from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that rolls back protections for migratory birds. 

These last two are the ones that most alarm me. The narrow definition of "habitat" has allowed Trump to open forests in the northwest U.S. to logging, threatening the northern spotted owl. Trump's order removing protections for migratory birds threatens, among others, the bald eagle, the symbol of this land. For this reason, 12 states filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York alleging this Trump orders violates the Endangered Species Act.

Martha, the last of the passenger pigeons (Smithsonian)

There are some people who believe what it says in the Bible, that man was given dominion over the animals, and use that as license to do what they want, including hunting some birds to extinction. Think of the birds no longer around - the passenger pigeon, the Carolina parakeet - except in the paintings of John Jay Audubon. According to the environmental organization that took his name, over 300 birds are on the brink of extinction, as of 2019, before Trump's executive orders. This is all because of climate change, one of your many concerns. But without action, that number will surely rise.

When the coronavirus is a distant memory and people can walk outdoors unafraid and unmasked, I don't want to live in a world when I can no longer see warblers, herons, hawks or owls. Do you?

Please act now.

Thank you. 

The Smallest Survivor

If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome. 

--Anne Bradstreet

I'm thinking about a gold-crowned kinglet this winter morning. 

It is at 8 a.m. the rising sun now comes out from behind my neighbor's house and hits me as I sit on my enclosed porch. Little by little the sun's arc has been lengthening as it rises higher in the sky. At this point I can only sit outside on the weekend for the 35 minutes or so I am in full sun at this point of the year because I need time to have breakfast and then ready for work. (In the pre-coronavirus days I would be on a train during this time.) 

The thermometer shows me it is 20 degrees F on the enclosed but unheated porch and my phone showed me it is 19 degrees outside, windchill of 9. That's why I'm thinking about the kinglet.

I am wearing a number of layers from head to toe, including a long down coat with hood. A gold-crowned kinglet, a tiny bird (about the weight of a couple of pennies) with bold markings on its face and wings and a yellow patch on its head (the male has an orange stripe on that yellow patch), does not have that luxury. The one I saw while taking a recent hike in the woods, trying to stay out of a fierce, cold wind, was flitting around quickly in a low shrub, looking for food. 

Gold-crowned kinglet, Pennsylvania, December 2013
(Margo D. Beller)

Usually I see this tiny bird high in a conifer, its preferred habitat, once I'm alerted to its presence by its buzzy tse-tse-tse call. They breed in conifer forests but when I see them it is during migration periods, mainly in autumn. But this bird seems to hang around in areas like mine in winter, as long as it can find food.

According to the people at the Cornell Ornithology Lab, a gold-crowned kinglet can survive in temperatures of -40 degrees F at night. That's 40 degrees below zero. How do they survive?

The scientist Bernd Heinrich wanted to know that, too. The gold-crowned kinglet (as opposed to its cousin, the ruby-crowned kinglet, which does not hang around here in winter) is among the creatures he studied in his book "Winter World" about survival in the harshest conditions. Heinrich, who is professor emeritus at the University of Vermont, owns a lot of property in Maine, which he has traveled for the observations in his many books. He found these kinglets, which normally eat insects, will eat what they can find in winter including spiders, insect eggs and moth caterpillars. They need to maintain an internal temperature of 110 degrees F, Heinrich found.

The gold-crowned will use old squirrel or bird nests and huddle together to stay warm, he found after following several to their roost one December twilight. Like me in my coat, sleeping kinglets fluff up their feathers to make an inch-thick, downy blanket. These feathers make up 10% of a kinglet's body weight. 

Heinrich also found that without this down layer, a naked kinglet would cool rapidly, which would be fatal. He caught one bird and weighed the wing and tail feathers, which are primarily used for flying, and compared them to the weight of the body feathers, which are primarily used for insulation. Kinglets have four times more feather mass committed to insulation than to flying, he learned.

Still, as I sit in the sun's warmth, warmly dressed in my down layer and holding a hot cup of coffee, I can't help but think of that little bird having to stay in perpetual motion on such a wicked cold day so it eat and thus survive. It is a cold, cruel world out there. I hope it survives.

.