I Heard a Bird Sing in December

It's been raining for days, a typical Pacific Northwest December series of storms. Today, though, the sun has made a rare appearance, and the backyard is all aflutter with activity. The birds continue to feed even during the worst of the storms, but when the sun comes out they are much more active.

A Bewick's wren is singing lustily from the holly tree, accompanied occasionally by a song sparrow, who is standing at the top of a forsythia bush which will be bright with yellow blossoms in only a few weeks. Even an Anna's hummingbird is singing its wispy song from the top of the pear tree, not so musical as the sparrow or the wren, but a hummingbird's song, small and quick and buzzy, well suited to the singer. The backyard chorus brings to mind a snippet of a poem by Oliver Herford:

I heard a bird sing
In the night of December
A magical thing
And sweet to remember.

'We are nearer to Spring
Than we were in September,'
I heard a bird sing
In the dark of December.
-----
Oliver Herford
(1863-1935)

We definitely are nearer to spring than we were in September. The signs are all around us. In some nearby gardens the tips of daffodils and crocuses are beginning to appear, just barely breaking the surface of the soil. The ends of branches on our pear and apple trees are showing just the slightest bit of swelling, pregnant with the promise of pink and white blossoms they will bring forth in March and April. And the red flowering currant, which only a week or two ago finally dropped the last golden leaf of 2002, is swollen with the crimson blossoms of 2003.

The birds, especially, show their appreciation for this rare glimmer of December sunshine. A ruby-crowned kinglet has been flitting under the eaves and window ledges of our house, hunting for tiny spiders hiding in their webs which glisten in the sun. A pair of scrub jays has been chasing each other in and around the laurels, probably the same pair which has nested here for the last several years. Robins have taken a break from their feast of holly berries to come for long baths in the bird bath which hangs off my deck, the water beading up on their backs and shining in the sun like tiny diamonds. Even the squirrels have ceased their endless raids of the sunflower feeders to play in the sunshine, chasing each other up and down tree trunks and flying through the branches in a joyous game of catch-me-if-you-can.

Our local meteorologists claim that this break in the weather is to be short-lived, that tonight the storms will start anew, and that they are even now lined up off of the Pacific coast waiting their turn to come to shore. And we need all that rain, to see us through the dry months of summer. But for now, I'll gladly turn my face to the sun and embrace it with joy, just like the wrens, and the sparrows, and the robins, and the hummingbirds, and the squirrels. Because in no time at all it will be spring again, and all the wonders promised by the swollen branches and the tips of plants breaking through the ground will burst into beauty.

Happy New Year, from my backyard to yours!