Six months ago, at the beginning of the quarantine, I posted images of newly budding elm trees covered in a late snow, and of walks close to home. We still walk daily by these elm trees.
The leaves are showing their age and beginning to yellow. The black walnut nearby is covering the ground in nuts, you stop under an oak and hear the acorns drop, and the squirrels running through the branches.
Walking by Mike and Mary’s elm a couple weeks ago, the blue jays were screeching and cawing a storm. Soon the neighborhood red shouldered hawk flew from a nearby tree and perched in the elm. We watched him sit on a branch harassed by the jays who were letting everyone know where the predator sat. Walking Chance under the tree, I said that Fritzy, my dog as a boy, would lay in the grass outside our back door under the palm trees by the bird feeders. When the blue jays were ready to eat, or just out of spite, they would gather round and begin screeching. They would take turns diving at Fritzy until he would get up and sleepily move away from the feeder.
We walked under the same tree a couple days ago. Lying by the trunk was a newly dead blue jay. He was far from a window, a not uncommon cause of a broken neck. Had the hawk killed him, he would’ve been food and just a pile of feathers that are another not uncommon sight. Instead, he just peacefully lay on the grass.
In my post last March, I included a part of a 1963 poem by Carl Sandburg describing new elm buds as yellow and gold mice. Had Sandburg written about blue jays? Google said he had, much earlier in 1920: A long, beautiful, strange poem Slabs of the Sunburnt West of his journeying on a train and looking at the forms and colors in the Grand Canyon. He saw a jay sitting on the chair of the maker of the canyon.
An arm-chair for a one-eyed giant;
two pine trees grow in the left arm of the chair;
a bluejay comes, sits, goes, comes again;
a bluejay shoots and twitters . . . out and across . . .
tumbled skyscrapers and wrecked battleships,
walls of crucifixions and wedding breakfasts;
ruin, ruin — a brute gnashed, dug, kept on —
kept on and quit: and this is it.
A repeating lyric in the poem is Sandburg’s vision of the colors of the jay and the mouse in the canyon walls.
A bluejay blue
and a gray mouse gray
ran up the canyon walls
I brought the blue jay home. I was planting bulbs for color for next spring. Nearby, last spring I planted a lilac. A red grossbeak had hit one of our windows, so when I dug the place for the bush, the bird went first, and then some dirt before the plant. Now a place for the blue jay, and then some dirt, and then the bulbs. In the spring when the lilac and grape hyacinths bloom, the colors of birds will add their song.
