Last fall, my friend Tom reached out one Saturday to report that his yard was bare of birds, though he’d set out three feeders full of seed.
How long, I wondered, had the feeders been in place?
“An hour,” Tom told me, laughing at his own impatience to get results.
I reminded him, as I often remind myself, that birdwatching isn’t like ordering a movie on Netflix. Sometimes, you have to wait a while for something to see. It was late afternoon, and songbirds often eat more in early morning or around dusk. I headed over to Tom’s house to help him keep vigil.
We each poured something cool to drink and sat down in a quiet corner of the yard, chatting softly as we cast an occasional glance at the feeders to see if they’d drawn their first visitor. We talked about jobs and children, friends and neighbors, the passage of time, and whether an old oak a few feet away had reached the end of its life.
Tom’s feeders remained vacant as we caught up on things, though he shared a video the next morning of a chickadee arriving to sample the feast. I wasn’t sure what I’d liked the most — the spectacle of this little bird having breakfast, or the time I’d passed with a friend as we shared sentry duty the day before.
When I started birdwatching more than three decades ago, I thought of waiting as the price I had to pay for the chance to spot something beautiful. With age, I’m learning that the wait itself can be its own gift, a kind of sanctuary in which my life finds its center.
I thought about all of this again a couple of days after Christmas last year, when the season’s first goldfinch arrived at my window feeder. Goldfinches normally show up in my south Louisiana yard around Yuletide, a holiday meant to underline the value of waiting.
Advent, the church season before Christmas, is grounded in the idea that anticipation can deepen our sense of what’s truly important.
In practice, the holidays don’t often bring the kind of pause that honest waiting is supposed to cultivate. Instead, December’s calendar fills with parties and shopping, a blur of busyness in which seasonal serenity tends to get lost.
We’re now at the doorstep of Mardi Gras, when our goldfinches usually begin to leave for the year.
I’m trying to enjoy their daily visits to the tube feeder just beyond our living room, and I’ve loved watching them flock on our lawn to savor the seed I’ve scattered in the grass. I sometimes startle them at the window, and they rise and fall like a yellow wave lapping at the edge of the porch.
Once the goldfinches leave, I’ll have to wait many months for their return. Maybe the years are trying to tell me that waiting can be its own reward.
Email Danny Heitman at danny@dannyheitman.com.
