Most days I see a male cardinal in the hickory tree behind the house, waiting to forage beneath the bird feeders. You don’t really “see” a male cardinal. The world collapses to a carmine point that puts everything else out of focus — the hickory, the snow, the woodsmoke from the village. For its character, modest and cautious, the cardinal is overdressed. But then what would living up to that plumage mean?
It would be nice if starlings came in ones and twos and were more like the cardinal in demeanor. We would see the ornateness of their feathering, which reminds me of the marbled endpapers of well-bound books. I’ve used starling hackle feathers for tying trout flies, and each one is a bit of the night sky with an iridescent galaxy shining near the tip.
Starlings come in gangs and mobs and hordes. They mug the suet and bicker over the oil-seed feeders. They fight all the time, yet only with one another. The other birds look on like hosts watching their dinner guests brawling across the table.
I find myself reflecting on the fact that there are 200 million starlings in this country, all descended from a few dozen birds released in 1890 by the American Acclimatization Society, which was devoted to introducing European species to America. Starlings are good intentions in the flesh, which says nearly everything about good intentions.
But they’re here, and I look for a reason to admire them, apart from their feathers. They waddle, duck-like, and this makes them seem less leather-jacketed. But it’s no use. They have de-nested billions of birds, and the porch where the feeders hang looks like a scene from Hitchcock.
Then one morning they’re gone. The cardinal sits in the hickory. The chickadees take a seed, then pivot for a glance around. The woodpeckers are on the suet, probing quizzically. The house sparrows — 19th-century imports themselves — move civilly among the fallen seeds as if to show they belong.
