Exotic birds

I have always believed that exotic birds live farther south than Nova Scotia and that if you are looking for amazing displays of brightly coloured plumage you need to search somewhere else. In fact, when I went very far south a few years ago, all the way to a high school student writers' workshop outside of Melbourne, I was both amazed and delighted by the birds I saw routinely at John Marsden's property. Heading down to the main house for breakfast I would stop by a small bushy tree to watch brilliant red and blue Crimson Rosellas busily feeding on seeds or berries, and then check out the Sulphur-crested Cockatoos way up in the tops of the gum trees. The Kookaburra that sat on the edge of the veranda roof was less brilliantly colourful but still pretty striking and the Magpies over in the next field flashed their bright blacks and white backs. They were wonderfully exotic.

Exotic is defined as not indigenous, or alternatively, strikingly different, and in those senses exotic birds do (in fact, must) live somewhere else, and I won't see them here except as accidentals or captives. However, my Oxford also offers the phrase "attractively unusual", and it is both the strikingly different and attractively unusual that I want to focus on here. It's birds I'm talking about, local birds, not even necessarily unusual or different, but strikingly attractive when you take the time to look. And for those who have followed my posts to this blog, you will perhaps have gathered that I do have the time and I do look, and one thing I have time for is looking at the birds that wander through our property and, on occasion, feed at our feeders.

Today the American Crows are noisy and they are active. I haven't seen them yet with twigs or grass in their beaks (always a harbinger of spring), but they love the peak of Irene's roof and fly to and from there with breathtaking agility. The blackness of their bright eyes and of their plumage is always a wonder, and their black selves outlined against the sky are a glory.

The Blue Jays that visit the suet cage and the seed feeder are also corvids, but I usually see them only when they come to eat. One thing I do love is the soft grey and white of their undersides and the way it contrasts with the various shades of blue on their wings and backs, highlighted in places with bits of black and white. This jay, to someone from a very different clime, must in fact seem truly exotic, and it is; I think it’s just that for me, a person who lives in a northern clime, exotic always suggests tropical, some place warmer and lusher than here perhaps.

So my exotic jays visit the feeder, as does the single Cardinal, who comes from down towards the shore, making his way from tree to tree until he flies over to the feeder in centre of our magnolia bush. As my brother Chris, a birder, put it, cardinals are skulkers, and this one certainly is careful in his approach. His bright red plumage as he eats the seeds and grains reminds me of the Cardinal (a human one) in The Mission, resplendent in his red robe, or Wolsey in The Tudors, though my cardinal moves faster and has no religion or dogma that I can see.

Finally, there’s the Downy Woodpecker with her exotic black and white checks and stripes and her agility on the suet cage, and the happiest of birds, the Black-capped Chickadees, like their Eurasian cousins, the Great Tits (Note to North Americans: contrary to popular notion, these are birds!), that visited our feeder in Istanbul. Our chickadees flit back and forth to pick up seeds to take away and eat and then come back for one more and one more in their black caps and bibs, white cheeks, and that wonderful and subtle buff along their sides.

My friend Andrew used to classify the unidentifiable little species that flew among alders and along ditches we passed as "nondescript small brown birds", and we do have our share of them, but what can be more exotic and magnificent than the gorgeous iridescent mottling of the Ring-necked Pheasant’s breast, his scarlet wattle, white collar, and bright green and purplish head feathers as he walks carefully under our pine trees pecking at seeds on the ground and moving on majestically? Marvel, as I did, at the Superb Fairywrens in Australia, but come north, I say, to see some of our exotic birds! If we are lucky, we can find them in our own backyards.