Home

Appreciation hatches in bird-enthusiast's yard

08.05.10

The bird in query wasn’t just any bluebird, though. He’s a plumb visitor to Chielli’s home, and for the last few weeks he and his female counterpart have been guarding one of the nesting boxes that Chielli owns.

“They’ll vacillating away and watch from a distance,” she said while putting eats out for them.

The two birds have built a nest inside the box, and are raising a hatch of tiny babies. Chielli checks on them sporadically.

“We’re not the parents, so they’re all snuggled in,” she said after chance the box and seeing the tiny bodies huddled together while mom and dad watched from a adjacent tree.

For Chielli, a 53-year-old bird follower who moved here from the Pittsburgh area with her family about five years ago, watching the antics, listening to the singing and feeding the many birds that stop in her yard daily is a way of life.

“They come over in the morning from cheap and far,” she said. “I’ve learned to take marked joy in them.”

Bird-watching events are popping up all over Northeastern Pennsylvania this month, but Chielli is substantiation that people don’t have to go on hikes or attend workshops to see the odd creatures she’s found fascinating the last 30 years, thanks in part to her paterfamilias, who made it a point to feed and call to a cardinal that frequently visited their porch when Chielli was a descendant.

“When you’re a birder and start to have birds in your sustenance, they just become a part of you,” she said. “They’re everywhere.”

And in her yard, they are .

From the front yard bird box in which a up of tree swallows is building a nest, to the bluebirds raising a one's nearest in a side-yard bird box, to the backyard feeders filled with peanuts, milky millet and black oil sunflower seeds, birds certain they’ll live and eat well in the Chielli yard.

Her pastime is something many in Northeastern Pennsylvania can get high on if they just look around them, she said.

“Part of it is when you do birding, you become an observer,” Chielli said.

“These birds that get about back every year, they know the spot where I put the food,” she said with a grin, adding that every day she puts new food out about 7 a.m. and begins calling for her inconstant friends. Sometimes her husband joins her.

“He loves them,” she said, referring to her suppress, Jack, who works as the executive director of marketing communications and oversight relations at Wilkes University .

However, Chielli added, it’s her obligation to put the food out each day, make sure the birds have enough water and hamper on the nesting boxes.

“I’ve been looking at birds for more than 30 years, and I don’t ever get tired out of it,” she said.

“They’re wild. They fly. They do this magical emotional attachment that we can’t do, so they do bring this magic to our lives,” she added.

Chielli is a natural to three teenagers, Jake, Maria and Anthony, and even taught children in a preschool category at Wyoming Seminary about the kinds of birds found locally and what to forage them when she worked as a teacher’s assistant there.

“We had one Lilliputian boy who could identify 12 birds,” she said.

Another babe, who was battling an illness and withdrawn from her classmates and family, formed a correlation with the wild creatures, thanks to Chielli’s instruction.

“(Her inventor) thanked me and said that had built a bridge between them,” said Chielli, who staunchly believes that caring for, calling for and watching birds is a way to fly the stresses of life.

“These birds just keep doing what they do without grievance,” she said. “It gives you an amazing high opinion for other beings.”

Source: Wilkes Barre Times-Leader

All could do with dose of 'Sightings'

07.05.10

Bill and Kathryn Allen are, like many of us, avid backyard birders. They charge out of their feathered guests at both their southwest Columbia home and their summer lodge in northern Minnesota.

We meet occasionally and swap tales of our favorite backyard birds — indigo buntings, orioles, tanagers, finches, thrushes and the auxiliary sparrow — all colorful and exciting.

Kathryn recently asked, “Have you present ‘Sightings’ by Sam Keen?”

“Never heard of either,” was the riposte.

“Too bad.”

Two days later, a copy of “Sightings — Rare Encounters with Ordinary Birds” was in the Clarks’ mailbox, compliments of Kathryn Allen.

Add me to recommend it to you — birders or not — as an evening well-done for.

It is a small book, 5 by 7 inches, only 120 pages, written by a professor of resignation and religion, a contributing editor of Psychology Today, an framer of a dozen books including the best-selling “Fire in the Belly,” and a lifelong backyard birdwatcher.

Each of his dozen essays is prefaced by an avian watercolor by the British painter Mary Woodin.

The hard-cover’s dust cover describes the collection of essays on birding “as point of departure for observations spiritual and soulful, witty and wise… translating the marvels of the unconstrained world to the language of the heart and soul.”

Keen, in his 70s and living in Sonoma, Calif., was born “into a cocoon of unquestioned obedience, a member of a Scottish Presbyterian family. As he grew, he began to uncertainty and often found himself in the woods “where all need for salvation vanished and for hours I was in a nation of natural grace … continuously in a mood of hushed fealty.”

Indigo buntings have returned to many of our yards, their blue awesome us in its brilliance, its continuous song from a treetop announcing what Eager wrote: “The bunting was the first to speak to me of the primal sacredness of entity, the basis of my creed — that there is a sixth sense, the expected religious sense, the sense of wonder.”

Like many of us, Sam Penetrating has birded with “a sense of wonder” his whole human being. “Sighting” is a diary of his journey through existence, finding both questions and answers from observing not the unusual, but the joint species with whom we share our time on Earth. Some observations:

“The wood thrush’s invite to evensong, a shaman song, has gradually transformed me into an delighted agnostic. Unknowing. Amazed.”

“The mourning dove’s commotion is a ticket to travel, a time machine, a magic carpet that wheels me into the elsewhere — values bright and early past, time present, time future.”

“Turkey vultures are icons that cue me to cherish mortality before it slips away. I feel their black presence circling on motionless wings just beyond the causticity of my consciousness. These days they are seldom absent for long.” He’s 71, recognize.

“I cannot escape the feeling that I am swimming against the stream of modernity. Like the turkeys in my yard, there is something difficult and ancient about me.”

His relation with the “Lord God Bird,” the ivory-billed woodpecker, is a communiqu that he might possibly have brought its extinction half a century ago.

Ol’ Clark loves Distressful’s description of the birders of the world:

“In an age in which the major world religions are patent by struggles between fundamentalists and progressives, birders are devoted to a set aside-minded pursuit of joyful revelations of what is beautiful and ritual. Their focus is aesthetic, rather than dogmatic or moral.

“Life is a honorarium to be enjoyed is their guiding maxim. The beauty of the winged creatures leads them from erotic enjoyment to reverence for life… practitioners of a theology of wildness.”

Source: Columbia Daily Tribune