the cries of kestrals
as street sweepers pass
spring arrives
I know one of the traditional signs of spring for many people is sighting their first robin of the year. For me however, it’s hearing my first kestral “klee-klee-kleeing” over the evergreen trees in our neighbourhood. Another sure sign of spring in the city is the appearance of street sweeping equipment out collecting the remains of a winter’s worth of sand. This morning I heard both things from my studio.
spring morning:
a sparrow tosses old twigs
while I clean house
As the temperatures have risen, it seems both man and beast are eager to set our houses in order. Earlier this week I began our spring cleaning and had hauled out a bag of garbage to the bin in the back alley when I noticed a small pile of twigs on the sidewalk near our garage. I looked up just in time to see a male house sparrow with a beak full of twigs fly off. I watched him for nearly half an hour as he demolished an old nest tucked under the eaves (I don’t remember seeing anyone using it last year) and used some of the materials to build a new nest in the neighbour’s back yard. I say “some of the materials” because he seemed quite particular about what was suitable for re-use: he’d pull one twig out of the old nest and let it drop to the ground, then he’d pull out a nearly identical looking twig (well, to me at least) and fly off to the new nest site. I’ve never seen a sparrow do this before and wonder if “recycling” is something they do frequently or if a lack of suitable nesting materials had forced this sparrow to re-use old materials. I waited until evening to sweep up his discards and add it to our trash bin.
hiking in the valley
snow squalls then sunshine
over the last hill
I thought, considering I was away last week, I would give you two haiku this week. The first one was inspired by a hiking trip we took with the a group of girls from my daughter’s class on the last day of our field trip. Everyone was tired after a morning of digging out the quinzhees (a shelter made of a pile of snow that’s been allowed to settle and then the center is dug out - yes, this is just one of the things we Canadians do for fun in the winter) but the afternoon activity was either skate or hike. And I’m not sure which was more “mercurial” the weather or the girls’ tempers, but everything seemed to brighten when we made it back to camp.
winter-killed spruce
juncos still flock
in its branches
The second poem is from something I observed this week at the day job. In the center of the University of Regina campus is a green space called the “Dr Lloyd Barber Academic Green” (named for the University’s second president) that features an oval walk lined with trees. Unfortunately, this winter a few of the transplanted spruce didn’t make it through the cold snap and have turned a rusty brown. But that hasn’t stopped a small flock of dark-eyed juncos from using the trees as a convenient place to catch their breath on their way through the campus from a nearby residential neighbourhood.
Valentine’s Day -
finally an end
to the cold snap
For the past few weeks we’ve been having some traditional Saskatchewan mid-February weather with lows in the minus 30Cs. And then on Thursday it decided to warm up and give us all a bit of a break. It was a nice change. And if you’d like to read anything else into the poem, be my guest.
indoor sparrows!
my winter renovation
errand forgotten
This past weekend I was working on my daughter’s bedroom reno (still) and had to run over to the local ‘Depot to pick up a new curtain rod. As I was walking through one of the aisles, I heard the distinctive chirping of House Sparrows. After I watched them for a while, I asked around and apparently, a small group of about eight birds has made their winter home inside the store. They pick up dropped seed in the feed aisle, and drink and bathe in the horticultural department fountain.
I know House Sparrows are an introduced species to North America, and I know they are considered invasive and destructive to some native species, like Bluebirds, but despite all that, there’s something about them I like. After all, if you think about it, House Sparrows embody many attributes we admire in ourselves: they’re industrious, hardy, adaptive and social. A now common bird across Canada and the United States, House Sparrows have experienced declining numbers in their native Europe for the past several years and in Great Britain it’s estimated that their numbers have dropped by almost half in the last 30 years. And if an animal as hardy as the House Sparrow is finding it hard to make a living somewhere, that can only mean things are really getting tough out there.
