MONTANA STANDARD (Butte, Montana) 21 August 03 Birds good, snakes bad — period (Jay Ambrose)

I was 4 years old, standing at a dining room window in the old farmhouse on the Cairo Road near Paducah, Ky., watching while a mother bird on the other side of the glass dropped worms down the throats of baby birds. Then I was struck with horror.

A large black snake with flickering tongue was climbing up the slender tree toward the nest. I yelled for my mother in the kitchen to come to the rescue, and at first she laughed at me, as if I were making up another tall tale.

What happened next was a nature drama, witnessed years before people could view such things on TV. It is one of the two or three earliest memories I have. It remains vivid and came to mind the other day as I went out to gather up the newspapers in my driveway and listened to the sweet sunrise songs of the birds so lush in the trees and shrubs around my house in northern Virginia.

I have never lived in a place with so many birds, so many species of birds and so many different bird voices. My consciousness of birds is therefore the most intense it has been since childhood. They are unavoidable, as when I came nose to beak with a completely yellow bird atop a backyard tomato plant several years ago.

What could it be? When it fluttered off, I raced inside. Not having yet accumulated a small library of bird books, I did an Internet search, and there it was, a yellow warbler.

The brightly colored birds are my favorites, and the favorites of my wife as well. Early this spring, I received a phone call at work. ``I just saw one,'' she said, and I knew immediately what she was talking about. We had been wondering aloud when the cardinals would return. We now seem to have a pair living close by. They feed on seeds we put on a deck railing — the splendidly beautiful, solid red male, and the more modest, less extravagantly plumed female.

Yet we both also thrill to the smaller, darker birds, such as the black-capped chickadees that particularly attend to the small-bird feeder hung on a limb where it is supposedly far from the leaping abilities of squirrels, called ``tree rats'' by some of my neighbors. I myself get a kick out of the squirrels, one of whom did manage the daredevil feat of jumping and grabbing onto the feeder with a paw, twisting wildly before a fall less than back-breaking.

The hunger is to see more, hear more, understand more, and so I now have binoculars through which I can keep a closer eye on my feathered friends, such as a blue jay that the other day got in a tangle with two black birds. He got the worst of it, finally disappearing into the leaves.

Another tool is a Birdsong IdentiFlyer (cq). You press buttons next to the names and pictures of birds and thus learn to identify what birds make what sounds. A booklet warns you, though, to exercise care. A male might catch the call and think another male is competing with him for a female or challenging his claim to his territory. Creating bird angst is not the point of the clever instrument.

I've been on an expedition with knowledgeable birders to nearby, wonder-filled Mason Neck National Wildlife Refuge, established mainly to help save bald eagles. I saw no eagle, but saved notes that show I did see a gray catbird, a little blue heron, a green-backed heron, an osprey, an American goldfinch, a red-headed woodpecker, a downy woodpecker, a willow flycatcher, an American crow, a chipping sparrow, a snow goose, a snapping turtle and two snakes.

And speaking of snakes, I must finish the story I started. While I gazed in fear from the window, the mother bird flew from the nest and pecked the snake, aggravating it and causing it to head earthward to attack this pest. On the ground, the bird pretended to lameness, limping across the lawn and flying when necessary to escape striking fangs. The snake was halfway across the yard when my mother appeared, chopping it in half with a shovel.

I suppose I will now hear from people saying you should not interfere with nature's ways and pointing out the virtues of snakes, but I do not care. Those birds were saved, and I'll sacrifice a snake any day for creatures that make so many of us marvel with joy that there could be such a universe.
Birds good, snakes bad — period

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