Well before my daughter was born (before we knew she was going to be a daughter), my mom purchased a My First Bird Book complete with a window-mounted bird feeder. When Marian was old enough to sit upright and observe her surroundings, we mounted the feeder in a window that overlooked the backyard. As a toddler, Marian would sit, framed by the picture window in our game room, and identify the birds. There were 'carnies' (cardinals), 'mourning does' (doves), and even 'hummytoomies' (hummingbirds) that would visit the daylilies. She would proudly point them out and then page through her book until she came to the appropriate bird. Sometimes she would toddle over to our dog, Inigo, and educate him. He always listened patiently.
Slowly but surely, the bird sanctuary grew. When my mother-in-law heard how much Marian enjoyed birdwatching, she gifted her a free standing post with attachments for various kinds of feeders. There was a water dish, a tray, and hooks for hanging suet cages. We replaced the first window-mounted bird feeder with a larger, see-through one. Buck, the backyard squirrel, had broken the first one. With each new fixture, the variety of birds we attracted increased. Marian's first book was no longer sufficient to identify all that we would see, so my mom contributed a few additional books, more comprehensive than the first. Aside from the usual backyard fare, we enjoyed the company of flickers,
nuthatches,
and even redheaded woodpeckers.
One day, not long after Christmas of 2019, we looked out the double doors of our dining room and saw this:
Now, we can't claim to have attracted this fine fellow with any of our feeders, but his distance from the house did make us aware that we lacked a certain necessary viewing apparatus. In order to really see him, we had to dig out my husband's heavy, ancient binoculars...or zoom in on him with our digital camera. Obviously, the next addition to Marian's bird watching paraphernalia had to be a pair (several, actually) of binoculars. She now has a pair that we take on vacation and a pair that hangs from the bookshelf in her bedroom. She used them just the other day to observe a pair of goldfinches playing in the bird bath in our front yard.
Some of you may be asking yourselves, what does this fiasco of feathered findings have to do with genealogy? Well, something this 52Ancestors challenge has reinforced is that genealogy is much more than just dates and documents. It's about life's important moments. It's about memories. Because of a single gift, we have the memories of countless mornings and evenings sitting together, sifting through our growing collection of bird books, trying to identify an unusual backyard visitor. We even have an old Audubon book that belonged to my grandmother. We can read the notes she left in the margins concerning the birds she had been able to identify. At my mother's house, there is a dry erase board. On it, she and Marian keep track of the type and number of birds they have seen. My dad has hummingbird feeders at the front and back of his house, and Marian enjoys watching 'Grandpa's hummingbirds' fight for supremacy. And every day, as we drive to school, Marian keeps up a running commentary on the birds she sees sitting on posts or circling in fields.
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