What was your first bird of the year? The first bird you saw outside on New Year’s Day. Mine was cardinal for the second year in a row, but 2022 it was a single scarlet male the only color in a winter landscape full of snow. This year the day was gray looking more like late November here than December. Three female cardinals fluttered around the bird feeders their soft brownish tan bodies with the tips of faint red at crest, wing and tail blending into the dead leaves and bare trees so that only their movement betrayed them. The first bird traditionally tells us what the coming year will be like, or what will be important to us. I have had January firsts where the birds all hid and I saw mammals, squirrels one year, and a cat one year. But it’s usually a bird, then you have to figure out what the message is for the year. Squirrels for me are to balance work and play better. Cat, was a sign to ask my allergist if I could have my first cat. That was a really wonderful moment after twenty years of allergy shots. Doves usually mean it’s going to be a year of matters of the heart, or issues associated with Goddess. Cardinals usually mean I need to be willing to be seen more, to stand out and say, look at me! It’s a lesson I struggle with like most writers, because on one hand we want our books to be wildly popular and sell tons, and make us tons of money to go with all those sales, but we are also usually introverts and shy, or at least more comfortable at our desks than doing interviews or public appearances. Even if we’re good at the public side it drains us. I was not happy with last year’s message of bright red cardinal, but female cardinal is a little less flashy. She does most of the egg sitting in the spring because her coloring lets her blend in and not attract predators while the male is the stalking horse saying, look at me and don’t look for our nest. Do I get to hunker down at home and nest this year? Cardinals don’t stop with laying eggs and raising chicks just once in the spring, unlike most song birds they will rinse and repeat two to three times a year. Here in Missouri where the weather stays mild longer I’ve seen them still feeding fledglings in early October. Though that’s a chancy month in the Midwest, because we can get a freak October snowfall. The year I noticed them feeding in October the weather stayed mild, luckily. They build a fresh nest for each set of eggs, probably because even the slowest predator might figure out where their nest is if they keep going to the same location to feed babies from March to October. Once they successful raise all their young then it’s time to form winter flocks with the juvenile birds who look just like mom. The males won’t get Dad’s bright red plumage until next spring, so the threesome I saw by the feeders on January 1st probably weren’t all females, but mom and chicks all camouflaged together to up the chances of this year’s babies surviving the winter without getting eaten by a hawk, or other predator. Maybe that’s my lesson for the coming year that I don’t have to be the brightest thing in view, but just concentrate on laying as many eggs (ideas) and raising as many chicks (books) as possibly this year. Be wildly productive and concentrate on writing new stories, and don’t put all my eggs in one nest, basket like the cardinal I’ll up my chances of success by having multiple nests for different broods (ideas/novels/stories) and concentrate on raising them until their ready to fly on their own and share with all of you.
Tag: First bird of the year
2020, a decade, and a new bird
It’s that time of year again, time for the first bird of the year. It’s a tradition among birders, bird watchers that the first bird you see on New Year’s day will be a theme for the year to come. It can be the first animal you see if you’ve been up for hours and seen no birds, which happened to me two years in a row with squirrels. The moment I owned squirrel as my power animal for the year, birds appeared. It was like magic. Those two years were about trying to balance work and play. The last two years it’s been dove, and I was really hoping, praying that it wouldn’t be a third year in a row. Why, you might ask, because dove is about matters of the heart and coming to terms with Goddess energy, feminine energy for me. Learning lessons of the heart is never easy, always worthwhile, but never easy. I was ready to get a message from the universe that I’d done my heart and love work to a point where I could move on. My husband, Jonathon, and I are closer than ever and have hit that deep abiding, contentment where the fire burns low and high, but never goes out, and we know how to throw more wood on our fire and get sparks. Eighteen years of marriage and we’ve never been happier as a couple and as individuals; yay, working your shit!
I’ll mention it here before someone else asks, our other halves, Genevieve and Spike, requested to not be part of my public persona a couple of years ago. They found the “fame” part of things uncomfortable. They are private people and deserve to have their personal life be as private as they wish, yes it was a bone of contention for awhile, but if you love someone you honor their wishes, so I have. It has been difficult, because I blog from my heart, and write from heart in many ways, though I write fiction. It’s made blogging about my life very difficult and is one reason I almost stopped doing it. I don’t know how to edit my real life the way I edit my fiction. This has been some of the heart and love work of the last two years.
I’m happy to say that this year’s bird is, Dark-eyed Junco. It’s a type of sparrow, though you’d never know it to see the charcoal gray and white body, or the black upper body with a white stomach, or a mostly charcoal body, or – they are incredibly varied in their plumage. There are even different colors for different regions of the country that look nothing like the birds we see here. They are winter birds here, arriving between October to November, or even as early as late September. You know the term, snowbirds for people who travel to warmer climates for winter and then return in the spring that’s exactly what Juncos do here. We’re their winter vacation spot.
Jonathon and I saw a small flock of Juncos at the same time this morning as we made coffee and wrangled breakfast. He called out, “Junco!” I actually turned away as if he’d called it and so it couldn’t be my bird of the year. I even walked to another window and everything was hiding from me, just movements in the trees, until I realized that there was no rule, no calling dibs on a bird. Once I owned that we had the same bird of the year for 2020 then suddenly I saw the downy woodpecker and the white-breasted nuthatch on the trees and bird feeders. It’s been like that every year, until I own the first bird/animal the rest of the world is quiet, then boom – birds and other animals everywhere.
If you think that sounds too mystical, all I can tell you is that it works that way for me. Also, we’re Wiccan, as in yes modern day Witches, which is a nature based religion, so paying attention to birds and other wildlife is a part of our faith. God and Goddess speak through nature all the time if you know how to listen.
If squirrel’s lesson for me was balancing work and play, and dove was about love and the divine feminine, what does Junco mean? My husband and I aren’t entirely certain yet. We’ll be meditating and paying attention as time goes by, but I’m pretty sure it has something to do with travel, maybe even moving. The Juncos were in a flock, so it could also be about group communications. Interpreting the lessons of nature isn’t always an exact science, but then most faith isn’t that simple, add magic and it can get a lot more complicated. So here’s to 2020, a new decade, and the year of the Junco!
First bird of the year & New Year’s Resolutions
Sorry it’s taken me this long to blog about my first bird of the year, but I’ve managed to get a sinus infection for the first time in years and the worst migraine I’ve had in years. This is also my first winter in cold weather in years. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. Apparently I’ve become acclimated to the tropics. My younger self raised in Northern Indiana would call me a weather wimp.
Of course, maybe I angered the gods of wine and frolic with my last blog, because after saying I didn’t want to drink or party, I spent the rest of New Year’s Eve with a migraine. So, ironically without drinking a drop of alcohol I got the headache, nausea, and the next day had a migraine hangover. Probably worse than many of you that had a much more raucous party night.
New Year’s Eve will probably never be my favorite holiday, but I promise to keep the spirit of the evening in my heart and mind year round if I just never have another migraine. So in the spirit of this time of year I will make New Year’s resolutions, but first, the bird of 2019 for me.
When I finally woke on New Year’s Day 2019, which was close to noon I was feeling so rough I almost forgot it was the first day of the year. What was my first bird of the year? European Starling. Yep, a Starling. The pests that had just found our bird feeders and emptied them, and have emptied them faster than we can fill them ever since January 1. Did you know that all the Starlings in this country descend from two hundred birds released on the east coast? A Shakespeare society released the birds, because they thought it would be a good idea to have every bird mentioned in Shakespeare in America. My understanding is that they had to release Starlings more than once for them to survive. If I could go back in time I’d tell them the damage the birds have done to our native cavity nesting birds like the bluebird.
According to birder tradition, Starling will be my theme of the year. My bird of the year in 2018 was dove, matters of the heart, romance, Goddess, and certainly that was a theme for last year. I’ll blog more about that at some point, but let’s just say that I’ll take a year of the Starling over another year of the dove. Starling can mean communication, group issues, or maybe I need to reread Shakespeare? I’ll be mediating on the bird to figure out what lessons I’m supposed to learn from it. Oddly, the first animal I saw this year other than our house pets was a neighbor’s Australian Shepard. I did have a couple of years where squirrel was my message of the year, and the year that we got our first rescue cats it was a cat staring at me on our front stoop. So Starling and Australian Shepard, maybe? I’ll look up the history of the breed and see if there’s any cross over between them and Starling. Or maybe it’s my year of the Aussie? 🙂
Okay, in the spirit of truly celebrating New Year’s Eve here are my resolutions:
- Walk and socialize the dogs more.
- Add more cardio in the gym.
- Add two more training sessions of FMA (Filipino Martial Arts) per week, to the two I’m already doing.
- Use my new training gloves so much that they need replaced by next January 1.
- See and socialize with my friends more often.
- One vacation trip to somewhere I’ve never been.
- More gun range time per month.