I'm so Sweet

This morning I awoke to a cacophony of bird songs. When I lived alone out in the country, I kept my windows open as much as possible. Part of it was for practical purposes and part of it was the lullaby of forest and country sounds that lulled me to sleep and then woke me in the morning. There was a little Carolina Wren that would sing with all of his might every morning. In the spring, the Towhees scratched around beneath my window and picked up seeds dropped by other birds. In the fall and winter, the White-Throated Sparrows woke me in the pre-dawn hours and then the Bluebirds found my yard and I had their soft, lilting song to entertain me. In the heart of the summer, the Whippoorwills ushered me into sleep, with their back-up singers, the Spring Peepers and Copes and Gray Tree Frogs. It was wonderful.

Thanks to allergies and two monster whole-house HVAC filters, we tend to keep our windows closed as much as possible. Last night, I decided to open the window by my bed, just a crack, to listen to the rain, the frogs and my little fountains below. Several persistent crows, the local Towhee and the Goldfinches woke me this morning along with a new visitor.

"Sweet, sweet, sweet, I'm so sweet, sweet", was the pretty little song that I heard this morning. While my green tea was brewing, I stood at the window, and saw the owner of that little song, an Indigo Bunting. While the male is hard to miss with his brilliant, electric blue plumage that sets him apart from other blue birds because he is entirely blue, the female is easy to miss. She looks a lot like a female House Finch and is even similar to a juvenile Cowbird, but a couple of inches smaller. She has the curved finch beak similar to Cardinals and other finches, but she’s a pretty tawny brown with very fine streaks on her breast that stop about halfway down, topped by a whitish throat. She looks fair and like her song: sweet. The house finch is a little grayer and its body is tilted more forward while the Indigo has a more upright posture.

That’s one of the perks pf leaving your window open; you never know what you might discover in your back yard. We don’t always see the new visitors to our yard, but sometimes we get lucky enough to hear them.