KATHY AND I sat on the Pine Point cabin deck
AS KATHY AND I sat on the Pine Point cabin deck, sipping morning coffee and tea, listening to bluejays screaming and pileated woodpeckers cackling and chickadees singing, and humming birds humming and mourning doves cooing and bald eagles screeching, it suddenly occurred to us. How many birds do we have here, anyway? Here in our 12 acre piney woods by the river. From the half-ounce hummingbird to the 6-foot-wingspan eagles? How many of these creatures make our woods their home?
We had no idea. So we asked the Google machine, or the Internet, or AI, or whatever oracle/entity it is that can now answer questions at the speed of light. And… we got an answer.
In our ‘healthy’ Minnesota woods of about 12 acres, we likely have—in mid-summer after nesting and fledging—perhaps 200 birds. Being on the river shoreline probably puts us on the high end of estimates, so I suspect we are over 200. During spring-fall migrations we would have hundreds more as temporary visitors.
This perspective made us smile. In a challenging time in a challenging world, when so many of our fellow human beings are behaving in strange and deplorable ways, it is good to feel like caring for a small woods is—well—important. That such a place is ‘home,’ with all that entails. Not just for us but for these magnificent, wonderful, musical, mysterious neighbors. Neighbors that daily remind us that, yes, life on Earth is tenuous and difficult and ever challenging.
But also, that life—this shared life lived with trees and animals and rivers and winged friends and one another—is good. And it is always good to know more about it.
(This is my latest Substack post. You can follow/subscribe to me there at Notes From The Campfire@douglaswoodauthor. https://substack.com/@douglaswoodauthor)