Of all the birds in my yard – and though I’m partial to Robins, for obvious reasons – my favorites to watch are the wrens. They’re tiny and adorable, they wag their tails, they hang around the house, and then they open their teensy beaks and this huge, rolling, gigantic wave of song comes out. How do they do that? When one of them sings outside a window, you’d swear he – or she – is inside the house. A group of them is called a “chime.”
The hanging gourd they nested in last year fell apart over the winter. Doug was willing to build a wren house for me, but spring came so early that the birds were back while he was still working on the eighty-seven other projects I’d asked him for. Well, probably not eighty-seven, but you get the idea. So I went down to the local bird-supply store, bought a ready made wren house, and hung it from the eaves. I really felt it was inferior goods, and wasn’t sure the wrens would go for it. They did.
One thing I learned about wrens, is that they like to have a fake nest as well as the real one. I hung a ceramic birdhouse for them to use as their alternate, from my garden fence across the lawn. They filled both birdhouses with sticks and twigs, but when I walked underneath the one at the house, I could hear baby birds up there, cheeping away, building up their tiny lungs for the day when they would blast the neighborhood with song.
Apparently I was standing too close while taking these pictures and aroused parental wren suspicions. Whoever it was on duty – hard to tell male from female wrens – watched very carefully for several minutes. I tried to look nonchalant, backing off a little, but when I looked up again the wren leaped out into the air and took off flying, straight to the fake nest of the ceramic birdhouse.
I was sorry the wren felt threatened, but pleased to know I had provided the fake nesting site. I hope it works well for them. And I did get a nice photo of flight.
The wrens are used to me puttering at my garden bench or on the deck, so I went back to doing that, hoping to be recertified as harmless. But I did watch, making sure the wrens came back. It didn’t take them long, so I guess I’m not so scary after all.
The Wren
A bundle of song packed in feathers
tiny bird that makes so huge a sound,
small thing that will not be ignored
holding his ground.
Look up, he says, the hawk
hangs on my every note.
Listen to my song
while it’s in my throat.
One of the joys of the spring garden is surprise. Where did these ultra-fluffy, double pink columbine come from? Not only don’t I remember buying them, I don’t remember even knowing they existed. Could they have arrived as seeds embedded in bird droppings? Such an ignoble origin. Could there be a Johnny Columbineseed at large in Ann Arbor, spiriting unusual flowers into unsuspecting gardens under cover of night?
Then over here, how did one tiny patch of forget-me-nots take over the entire flowerbed, even crowding out weeds? A blue haze under the fading spikes of daffodil leaves, it manages to be really in your face despite such tiny petals. It should be called I-dare-you-to-forget-mes.
Moving around to the back yard, a flower pot that once held cosmos has come up with a crop of these little purple flowers, small enough to be violets but somehow I wasn’t convinced. Pansies were in the pot next to it last year. My garden books say four petals up and one down makes it a pansy, two petals up and three down is a violet. Two up, one down, and two sticking out to the side? Panselets?
And then there’s the asparagus patch. I’ve seen it every year since we moved into this house, but it still makes me laugh to see the way it comes up out of the ground, looking for all the world like someone has snuck out to the garden and stood a bunch of asparagus spears upright in the dirt as a practical joke. But no, they’re growing right out of the ground. The second joy of the spring garden: that dirt, water, and sunlight turn into food and beauty, whether the way we expected or not.
Robin Richstone 