My youngest child returns to preschool today. We are both excited since his last day was March 18th. To keep him busy while I was blowing my hair dry I asked him to draw a picture for his teacher.
When he brought me the picture, seeking my approval, I was able to distinguish every item: flower with stem and leaf, grass, sun, honey bee, and an airplane. As he was going over the picture, explaining each detailed drawing, he pointed to the airplane and told me that it was bird. This made me sad.
Although we live in Orange County with beautiful beaches, mountains, green hills, and flowers a plenty, my children are familiar with four types of birds, and these are not wonderful birds. For the most part, they are horrible birds.
The black bird that my son drew is the bird that he sees most often, a crow. They honk, holler, and dig through the garbage regularly. They are large and annoying, not pretty song birds.
We also have seagulls and pigeons which we have affectionately named, "rats with wings." They are also trash diggers, large, and gross. The cutest, and most lovely birds we see on a regular basis are sparrows. They are plain and brown without a stitch of color. Not so lovely.
Our bird selection makes me sad. Every once in a while a yellow finch comes to visit and the occasional hummingbird, however, any faithful bird watcher, living on my street, would be sadly disappointed with the view from his binoculars - crows, crows, crows.
When he brought me the picture, seeking my approval, I was able to distinguish every item: flower with stem and leaf, grass, sun, honey bee, and an airplane. As he was going over the picture, explaining each detailed drawing, he pointed to the airplane and told me that it was bird. This made me sad.
Although we live in Orange County with beautiful beaches, mountains, green hills, and flowers a plenty, my children are familiar with four types of birds, and these are not wonderful birds. For the most part, they are horrible birds.
The black bird that my son drew is the bird that he sees most often, a crow. They honk, holler, and dig through the garbage regularly. They are large and annoying, not pretty song birds.
We also have seagulls and pigeons which we have affectionately named, "rats with wings." They are also trash diggers, large, and gross. The cutest, and most lovely birds we see on a regular basis are sparrows. They are plain and brown without a stitch of color. Not so lovely.
Our bird selection makes me sad. Every once in a while a yellow finch comes to visit and the occasional hummingbird, however, any faithful bird watcher, living on my street, would be sadly disappointed with the view from his binoculars - crows, crows, crows.
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Before moving to Calgary, we lived in a community of 10,000 in a rural area. Our home was nestled on 1/3 of an acre that had a few 100 foot Cottonwoods on it. I'm not even sure how many other trees we had. It was like a park.
And birds? All stripes and colors and feathers, flocking together.
Now we have a postage-stamp-sized "yard" and the only tree is a sapling we planted in protest when we moved in. When the sparrows show up from time to time they kinda look around like they're saying, "This is IT?" Our yard is like a one star hotel with roaches compared to our Busch Gardens at our last place.
So the bird population is pretty thin for us too. Bah!