For nearly forty years I’ve provided a variety of bird feeders and food for a parade of backyard visitors and permanent residents. After so many years of casual and quiet observation it is tempting to view the behavior of the various species as indicative of individual personality; perhaps, we humans cannot resist the shortcoming to anthropomorphize any thing with which we feel we have become familiar, even if our method was, at best, superficial. Of course, the dearth of scientific rigor doesn’t invalidate one’s experience or rescind the hours of amusement and pleasure one has enjoyed while directing one’s attention on something other than oneself; there is a subtle and liberating catharsis as the ego is shifted ever so slightly out of focus so that what is being attended to somehow manages to create its own frame of reference without the necessity of establishing the primacy of the viewer.
I’ve lost count of the different kinds of birds that the various feeders and plants have attracted throughout the years. Some might consider more than a few on the role call ordinary: chickadee, titmouse, cardinal, house finch, goldfinch, ruby-throated hummingbird. It is easy to chuckle at the slapstick antics of an ungainly red-bellied woodpecker perched precariously on a tube feeder swinging wildly under its bullied thrall as it scatters sunflower seeds while it searches for a single kernel unprotected by an impervious shell. Starlings and grackles manage to create nearly the same calamity as the woodpecker, but the ambiance is absent; the starlings have the look of scavengers while the iridescent grackles with their prominent golden eye give the impression of a Bond-like antagonist and provocateur lifted straight from the pages of Ian Fleming. House finches have asserted themselves where the purple finch was once more common with a more contentious noisy chatter that seems to revolve around the issue of rank at the feeder despite the abundance of open, well stocked perches. The occasional cardinal bedecked in its prelate’s red is seen more often earlier in the spring than later, surrendering a perch at the feeder to smaller birds. If birds have dispositions, the sweetest of these must belong to the goldfinches; however, the tiniest of hummingbirds must manufacture some sort avian testosterone from the nectar they imbibe as they seem as interested in engaging in aerial combat as they do in feeding. Beside the striking markings of the goldfinch, one of its most conspicuous characteristics is voice, which at times has an almost sweet, sugary quality, particularly as it communicates with its mate at the feeder at which time one gets the impression that it is uttering endearments rather stock elements of communication peculiar to goldfinches.
While several of the birds we have been accustomed to seeing have declined as we have permissively sprawled our subdivisions over uncut woodlands and once productive family farms, the clever bluejay, a feathered Ulysses, with all of its brashness and braggadocio has flourished –a member of the crow family it’s stentorian trumpeting belies its intelligence. And so I take umbrage with the song of a particular finch, one Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s magnificent novel, To Kill A Mockingbird, who instructs his daughter Scout that she may shoot all of the bluejays she wants but that she must remember that it is a sin to kill a mockingbird. I can’t help believing that Lee could have omitted this glaring flaw in the otherwise noble and unassailable character of Atticus Finch. Surely Atticus knew that taking any life has serious ramifications, which transcend the killed and extends to the killer. His gift of a gun might have been culturally and historically consistent, indeed my mother-in-law received a Remington 22 caliber pump action rifle when she was just a teenager from her father who was a doctor in a small southern town, however, an admonition regarding the sanctity of life would not be inconsistent with his own beliefs, his own efforts to save Tom Robinson. Atticus might have cautioned Scout that she could shoot at all the tin cans she wanted but she must remember that it is a sin to kill a mockingbird. The mockingbird would not lose its efficacy as a symbol for innocence or for those who are the victims of injustice; it might even add more impact to the courtroom scene in which Scout is told to stand because her father was passing.
How one determines what may live or die, what bird to kill or not to kill, what cause or ideal is or is not worthwhile, what is or is not just becomes less clear in the face of such arbitrary comments. In fact, at the end of the novel Atticus and the sheriff both choose not to pursue another killer, Boo Radley. Boo comes to the aid of Atticus’s children when they are attacked by Bob Ewell and slays Ewell in the ensuing struggle. Even though the mysterious recluse would be exonerated were a trial to take place, just involving him, it is suggested, would be like killing a mockingbird, which has much more cache as a title than to kill a bluejay.
