Monday, May 13, 2013

Birds in and around Allensville, Kentucky


My grandmother, Grandma Jean we call her, is a lover of creatures. She feeds just about anything with fur or feathers. Above all, she loves birds and maintains a small avian oasis in her backyard. When I would visit as a child, I would shoot straight for her kitchen window, looking for gold finches, cardinals, hummingbirds. Some seasons a robin would nest in the window sill beside her sink. My brothers and I would watch the soft blue eggs, waiting for the little ones to break free.


At home with my parents, who lived on a wooded dead end, I'd often spot larger species -- hawks, osprey, vultures, and the occasional pileated woodpecker, drilling dead trees with its unmistakable Morse code.

The early fascination has grown up with me. Now that I live south-western Kentucky, among fields the row croppers rotate from wheat to soybeans to corn, I see birds I had only known from field guides -- meadowlarks, quail, common night hawks, Mississippi kites, eastern bluebirds, indigo buntings. 

The last one I mentioned -- the indigo bunting -- is one that has just recently begun visiting our place. On Monday morning, two indigos darted in front of me as I drove out the half mile gravel driveway between my house and the road.