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| Cardinals and Copperheads by � kanee My Mom surrounded herself with animals and children and was close to the earth. She was especially close to birds. She had several wild �pets� who would follow her all around the homestead and kept her company while she worked. She even had them named. Who I remember the most was a little Robin she named �bitty bird�. He had either fallen or was kicked out of his nest and she had found him half naked on the ground. He wasn�t quite big enough to fledge yet. She took him into the house and fed him worms around the clock, kept him warm, and somehow he thrived. When he was big enough, she took him outside and helped him learn to fly. She said she had watched the other mamas do it enough that she knew what to do. She laid worms on the ground and let him �find� them. She brought him back in at night until they were both confident he could survive on his own. And he did. He stayed around there for at least another summer that I recall, and sang for his supper, as she would occasionally toss a worm his way as she worked in the gardens. Mom worked at getting as many different varieties of birds to visit her home as she could by studying birds and the plants and habitat that they preferred, and then providing that habitat for them. She would trudge out in the worst of weather, even after she became very ill and had to drag an oxygen bottle behind her, to break the ice in the bird baths and put out plenty of seed for the ones who stayed to winter here. One day she was rewarded for her efforts when one of her bird friends could very well have saved her life. She was hanging clothes on the clothes line one day late in the summer and she said that one of the male cardinals who had taken up residence in the cedars in the back garden started dive bombing her and squaking and generally raising cain. She couldn�t understand his behaviour at that particular time because the fledglings were long gone and there were no nests to protect. And she said he didn�t appear to be attacking her so much as he seemed to be warning her about something. She continued to hang out her clothes, though she was puzzled by his behaviour. The longer she stayed out there, the more insistent and loud the cardinal became, dive bombing closer and closer as she moved down the clothes line. She finally just stopped and started looking all around, trying to see what was upsetting him so. Catching a movement out of the corner of her eye, she finally saw it... a copperhead was coiled up just a few feet away in the bushes, ready to strike. THAT was what he was trying to tell her! She said she just said, �Thank you, sweetheart�, and went into the house, leaving the laundry to hang out later, after the copperhead had had plenty of time to decide to move on. And as soon as she went into the house, the Cardinal quietly went back to the safety of his home in the cedars. I asked her later why she hadn�t killed the Copperhead, as they are poisonous. She said, she didn�t need to. She had plenty of friends to keep an eye out for her and protect her. 05 January 2002 |