WATCHING BIRDS.

WATCHING BIRDS. In BLINK, Malcolm Gladwell writes of how David Sibley says that most bird identification is based on how a bird moves, on angles it takes, on how it flies and turns its head. I had thought that identification turned on the markings illustrated in the bird books. Yesterday and today were the first warm spring days and we went for walks. We saw just above our heads two chickadees taking turns disappearing into a chickadee-sized hole in a tree. THE SIBLEY GUIDE TO BIRD LIFE & BEHAVIOR says that chickadees will excavate a hole in a tree, perhaps left by a woodpecker, to make a nest, sometimes taking up to two weeks on the excavating. Farther on, we saw two herons high up in an old nest, raising their wings and displaying their plumage in what appeared to be flirtation. THE SIBLEY GUIDE says that herons do come back to old nests and they do engage in courtship rituals which show off their plumage. My Uncle Walter–my mother’s brother–kept notebooks on birds as a boy and worked in the birdhouse of the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago before World War II. He was going to be a zookeeper. He fought in most of the battles in the Pacific. He was in the amphibious engineers. If you watch the landings in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, the amphibious engineers had the task of getting the soldiers to the shore. He died soon after the war, I think in 1949. He was about 40.