Who can fathom a bird brain?

It’s been a couple of days of bird bemusedness.

First, there was an injured bluebird, being succored out at the farm.

And the begging duck, unfortunately trained by one of my cousins to like Cheerios, with the result that he (or she) was constantly underfoot at another cousin’s homecoming party.  Which is hilarious—partly because ducks are inherently hilarious but also because I’m more used to dogs and cats weaving around my ankles than I am to ducks.  (As I said to yet another cousin, “‘Stop chasing the duck’ isn’t a sentence I heard very often in New York.)  So, funny, yes, but I don’t really imagine that dropped potato chips are good for ducks.  On the other hand, hanging around the humans may keep it out of the way of predators, so who knows?

Meanwhile, we seem to be a stop on the migration path of the Turkey Vultures.  Nothing like seeing five or six of them ominously circling overhead and then looking up to find another dozen hulking in the trees above you.  Even if you didn’t know they were scavengers, I think you’d find those big dark forms, hunched over and peering down at you, to be something less than a good omen.

However, their dour presence is offset by the Canadian Geese standing on their heads in the pond.  Three or four of them with their little butts in the air just make me laugh–especially with a small white heron standing there staring at them.

We had a baby hawk sitting on our mailbox for a time last week.

Then, there are the coots.  I’ve been wondering where they’ve gone. And, yesterday, a group of four or five coots came back—in the rain—to huddle next to the sea wall.  I don’t know why they don’t swim under the dock.  The huddling seems to indicate they aren’t that fond of the rain, but they don’t take the obvious shelter.  So, I don’t know.  Who can fathom the mind of a bird?

But it’s a miracle, in the face of humanity’s ever increasing encroachment on their habitats, to have all these flighty friends around, still, to astonish and perplex me.