This Month's Story

We do have large windows, I will admit that. We live on a small farm Stella inherited from her parents. When we moved here fifteen year ago, we took down the old two hundred year old farm house and built a new, much larger structure. The old house had showed its age and was gracious enough to remain standing until our new home was built. Then we took it down and let its five, six or so termites the freedom to find new homes.

So now we have large windows (5 x 4 feet) that give us beautiful views of the farm around us.

Those views however, bring with them a rather unhappy price. The regional and migratory birds that use the farm are not able to detect that the house widows are glass barriers to their flight and we are the recipients of the occasional bang of a bird trying to fly through a reflective passage that doesn’t exist. Then we go outside to find a bird lying on our deck with a broken neck.

While we don’t have a continuous rain of dead birds, we do have the occasional accident that we find both disturbing and regretting.

Stella doesn’t remember this taking place when she lived with her parents. The windows in the old house were indeed smaller, but truthfully in the days of her (and my) youth, widows were hung with lace curtains to keep the nosey neighbors from spying (in Stella’s case, those neighbors were a mile and a half away). In those more gentle times, the birds did not see a reflection in the glass to mistakenly fly into.

Those fashionable, but dusty, curtains are long gone. But the beauty of the views we now experience, comes with a troublesome cost.

Yesterday, I heard a loud thump from the window looking out on the farm’s pond (in Pennsylvania, all farms have small ponds both for beauty, fish and more importantly for a water source for volunteer firemen to dip their hoses in).

I called Stella to come help me. Occasionally the bird that made the thump is only knocked unconscious and we fix a defense so a predator will not take advantage of the bird’s temporary condition.

We found a bird lying near the window, its neck twisted from its apparent fatal injury. It was a beautiful yellow and black stripped warbler, actually a migrating Blackburian Warbler. It was a tragic scene that we have seen too many times before.

However, this time, things were different.

A few feet away was another warbler. This one was alive. I’m not warbler-wise to tell the sexes, but let’s surmise and ask the obvious question: was he her mate? I think so.

Stella and I stood there and watched the tableau for a minute or two. Nothing happened. He remained where he was and she lay where she was.

We both had been doing something and left the window to check on both of our doings and then, within ten or eleven minutes, we returned.

We expected that he would be gone. Not so! Both were gone!!!

*****

It seems like it really doesn’t matter in the world of he’s and she’s, true love is always true love.