A Pandemic, a Snowstorm, a Blackout — and the Birds Who Got Me Through It
The Great Backyard Bird Count this year coincided with the jet stream going rogue, spilling its usually sequestered Arctic chill all over North America and Europe. The blanket of sub-zero cold stretched from Portland, Or. to Portland, Me., from Paris to Prague. On Valentine’s Day, my partner and I returned from a walk in the snowy park to a house without power. We lit a St. Jude prayer candle (a joke Hanukkah gift), doubled up on blankets, and woke up the next morning to an icy wonderland — inside and outside the house.
Icicles hung from our bird feeders. We weren’t birdwatchers before the pandemic — we were New Yorkers who threw pigeons the occasional crumb. Since moving to Portland to be with family during the pandemic, I’ve spent hours each day sitting in front of the same window. The first hummingbird feeder was a gift so that I’d have “something to look at besides that dying maple.” Having a few regular visitors proved contagious. Soon I was posting Instagram dispatches about hummingbird-song sparrow disputes, debating bird names over lunch. We’d just invested in a fourth feeder and a block of suet when the cold spell came.
On the snowy days before we lost power, I’d brought the hummingbird feeders into the shower with me to melt the sugar water, then duct-taped hand warmers to the glass. Without hot running water, it was up to Orlando and Virginia and Vita, Harold and Maude, to break through the ice with their needle-like beaks. I worried that even if they did survive the night, the cold nectar would stun them.
We spent the next seventy-something hours in a suspended state, huddled under blankets in the living room, wearing three pairs of socks. Meanwhile, outside the window, something remarkable was happening. The number of birds in our backyard had doubled, tripled, crowding the feeders. Several new species appeared; even a raptor paid a fleeting visit. I drained my phone’s battery cataloguing our sudden biodiversity. For this strange, brief period, we were each other’s only options. We kept our unlikely flock fed, and they kept us company.
You know how quiet everything gets, under a blanket of snow? And then the extraordinary crackling sound, like the sky is splintering, when the ice begins to melt and fall in chunks from the trees? And then the trees themselves are falling, downing power lines and caving in roofs, broken limbs and whole trunks because deciduous trees spread their roots wide and shallow, and in supersaturated soil they have nothing to hold onto. Our street was a morning-after battlefield of stranded cars and fallen trees. But in our state of torpor, all frozen fingers, the world around us was alive with wings. I tried to read, but the streaks of feathers outside the window kept catching my eye.
We scattered walnuts for the chipmunks and plump red squirrels. The chickadees and dark-eyed juncos waited underneath the feeder for falling seeds as the song sparrows and spotted towhees jostled for position. (“The only trickle-down economics that actually works,” we joked.) Everyone ceded to William of Orange, our impressively handsome varied thrush. We named the quarrelsome stellar jays Courtney and Kurt, who tyrannized the masses from on high. Valentino, the dashing hairy woodpecker who appeared on Valentine’s Day, spun the suet like a tire swing. We were feeding a dozen bird species while we kept our own food from spoiling in a cooler full of snow, and there was something there, a feeling that’s flattened when it’s turned into a lesson, but a lesson nonetheless.
For much of this past year, loss has been with me like a quiet ringing in my ears, a tinnitus of missing. But those few days without power — those literally powerless days — we kept dozens of creatures alive with cupfuls of nuts and seeds. I was thinking about the great unknown quantity of how much, how many we can save, with all our surplus, when I read about a nearby Fred Meyers calling the police on activists who were taking food from their dumpsters to stock community fridges during the power outage. It’s remarkable, how many opportunities we turn down to take care of each other. When we have so much, and when so much can be done with so little.
I haven’t sat on a couch with a friend in many months, but I’ve spent many days with Orlando, the magenta-throated hummingbird who visits the feeder by my desk. I was so worried when he didn’t show his face for three days during the freeze. I thought that he might have sunk into torpor, one frigid night, and never woken up. And then, on the day that the sky cleared, and the ice started falling from the boughs, Orlando appeared at the feeder in front of my window, and took a long, deep sip. We were both so grateful for the thaw.
