Journal: December 15

7:55 a.m., 12/15/97

We’re on our second day of our first Project FeederWatch count, which hasn’t amassed very impressive numbers so far, but should do better this morning, which is finally clear, though cold (20 degrees), with a heavy frost on every grass blade and pine needle. The birds were already feeding at first light, I guess to beat the squirrels to the punch. To indicate how dismal our totals are: our high for any species is four (chickadees). Pitiful! I hope we can improve our numbers today.

I made the most delicious bread yesterday, using the recipe for War Bread and adding to it some wheat berries I’d boiled for several hours. The cornmeal was some of the white P– had gotten in Cades Cove that has been taking up space in the refrigerator for better than a year.

My new resolution is to use up the foodstuffs we have on the shelves before buying more. I have a tendency to buy more pasta, ramen, rice, etc. at the store before I’ve run out at home because I see it and don’t exactly know how much I’ve got on hand. I remind myself of the chipmunk we had visiting the deck a few weeks ago, who filled its cheeks, ran off, and was back again in less than a minute to stuff its cheeks again. Hoarding. (Oh. There he is — the chipmunk — back at it again. I thought perhaps our little killer cat had gotten him, but I see not.)

I have just read all the Codas in Orion, the place they were hoping to use my MG 75 essay. Some of them are funny — very clever, really — some serious in tone; some seem much better to me than others. The most recent one is written by a woman in her 40s, who has stopped running and is now collecting herself. Which is fine, except who cares? She is still hungry, and maybe I would be, if I were still in my 40s, but in my 50s, I’m not. I’m astounded by how much I don’t know — I didn’t know until last night, for instance, that passerines can’t hear us because the range of sound they hear starts higher than our voices. They see us, but they don’t hear us. I discovered this and some other amazing facts in Roger Pasquier’s Watching Birds: An Introduction to Ornithology. The main reason to keep quiet while watching birds is to hear the birds, he says.

Watching the birds outside my window, I try to imagine the way they perceive the world. They see well — sight is their most highly developed sense. Their sense of touch is apparently dulled: “many birds do not seem to feel extremes of heat and cold on their feet,” though their bills, which look as though they would not be sensitive — they look like our toenails and fingernails that are not sensitive — have sensory nerve endings, as do the bristles around their bills, which have sensory cells at the base of the feather. Nerve endings in their tongues respond to texture rather than taste. Hearing is acute, though within a range that only partly overlaps our own. Apparently, their sense of smell is barely developed; likewise, birds have very few taste buds (40-60, compared to human’s 10,000); most of them on the roof of the mouth and in the throat. So I suppose that when I buy various types of suet, thinking I will give them a treat, I’m really wasting my time — or, at any rate, making the mistake of equating their idea of a treat with mine. What birds are doing out there, eating, eating, eating, is not pleasing their palates but staying alive.

Birds, it appears from this book, are built for lightness, buoyancy; designed, like a long-distance hiker on the Appalachian Trail, to eliminate burdens of excess baggage.