Stewardship for the Birds

This morning as I took my small walk to the marina, I kept reminding myself of what many smart folks advise:  even a half hour walk can help in all sorts of ways.  It doesn't have to be an extra pounds burning up walk.  Just getting the body moving is a good thing.

It's also good in other sorts of ways.  I've been delighting in the bird sounds that I only hear in the morning.  Do I only hear them because they only sing in the morning?  Or is early morning the only time the traffic/construction noises are silent enough to let other sounds slip through?

The other day I walked under a piercing bird sound.  I looked up and said, "Is that big noise coming out of you?"  Such a tiny bird with such a robust song!

I had a similar moment last week when I heard bird noises--but I was in my office, which I think of as hermetically sealed.  I'm lucky, in that I have windows and palm trees that wave to me outside them.  But I rarely hear much of the noise from outside of those windows.

But sure enough, there were some tiny birds perched on the tiny bit of window sill, and they chirped loudly enough for me to hear. 

I often hear the screech of parrots, but they rarely come close enough to be seen.  The other day I had to come back home in the morning to have my spouse notarize a document.  As I left the house, I noticed a parrot in one of the gumbo limbo trees out front.  I managed to get my husband's attention without scaring the parrot away.  And then, another parrot joined the first!

On our first night in Ft. Lauderdale, before we decided to move down here, when we were here for my spouse's job interview, we saw parrots on the electric lines overhead on Las Olas.  Seeing parrots seemed magical then, and it still seems magical, 20 years later.

When I saw the parrots in our gumbo limbo tree on Friday, I had been feeling exhausted and depleted.  But that moment was a turning point in my day.  My day might have improved in some other way, had I not seen them, however, I was surprised by how much they elevated my mood, and how long that elevation lasted.

Over the past decades, I've read many articles that worry about the fate of the birds, and I've read works that envision a life without birdsong.  Happily, that world is not our world yet.  I'll continue to cultivate my patch of the world to support the birds and other animal life and to stave off a birdless apocalypse for as long as possible.

It's an aspect of stewardship that we don't always talk about as spiritual folks.  But imagine the world that we might help create if we did more in this area of stewardship.