Birdwatching unexpectedly helped me find peace in motherhood

When I was in college, the only bird-watcher I knew was my grandmother who was in her 80s and mostly housebound from emphysema. From a cozy spot on her family room couch, looking through large glass sliding doors, she watched the birds feast on the abundance of food she and my grandfather left on the deck. Her birding attire was her usual Italian-chic—lightweight dress pants, a stylish knit sweater enhanced by the gold medallions around her neck, and short white leather boots. The birds, The New York Times crossword puzzles and watching the stock market were her day’s main events. 

I wonder when my grandmother first discovered birdwatching. I had heard my grandmother’s stories about making beach plum jam, catching crabs in the bay and chaperoning school dances well into her fifties, but nothing about the birds until later in life. She may not have had time for them while raising eight boys. This is certainly understandable.

I’m a working mom in my 40s with only one child, yet I find it difficult to keep up with life, and I multitask at a frenetic pace. One hour of my day is wearing a face mask to clean my pores while working on my laptop and waiting for the ding of the timer to signal it’s time to switch over the laundry. In the past decade, I’ve had little time for friends or dates with my husband let alone time with birds. It’s not that the birds are unavailable. There are certainly plenty in our little farming town. In fact, a couple of summers in a row a mother bird chose my daughter’s playground as the perfect place to keep her eggs safe. My daughter and husband videotaped the nest with the robin blue eggs and documented the hatching. I missed it because I was working, running the vacuum or updating events on our calendar.

Although I didn’t make an effort to go to the birds, the birds eventually came to me thanks to an unexpected birdseed wreath my husband’s co-worker gave him over the holidays two years ago. We hung it in our family room window and enjoyed watching the birds so much that we got two bird feeders this year—a wooden house my daughter constructed from a kit and a clear acrylic feeder that we added halfway through the season. 

We watch these little visitors from the couch, much like my grandmother did, while folding laundry or pausing before reading the next page of a book. While our time with them isn’t long, we take advantage of the small pockets between everyday activities. In these moments, I feel my breath slow and my attention focus on the birds alone. We dress in colorful sweats, but the birds don’t seem to mind. They are focused and unbothered by us until we wander too close to the window trying to take a photo of their ordinary day which feels extraordinary to us.

The birds are an art gallery, pop-and-lock dance routine and band all mixed into one. The fire-engine-red-cardinals and indigo-blue jays offer welcome pops of color against a dreary winter scape. The sharp, robotic head movements mesmerize me, and I wonder how they move so constantly and quickly. When we aren’t actively watching, we can hear them. The bass guitar bumping sound the feeder makes against the window alerts us that they are either fighting for a spot at the table or pecking at the seed. 

Here is where I would list each species we’ve seen, but I can only recognize a handful. Some are quite easy, like the black-masked cardinal whose image I saw on wall hangings, figurines and greeting cards in our home since it was my dad’s favorite bird, but others are more confounding. For instance, the purple finch, New Hampshire’s state bird, isn’t purple at all. The males are a raspberry color and the females are brown and white streaked. My eyes and brain get tangled over this incongruence, and by the time I sort it out, the bird has flown away. And, how do I easily distinguish the many brown birds from one another?

I’ve often joked that I must’ve missed the avian lesson in school. My mom gave me a laminated tri-fold of regional birds to catch up. I tucked it away in my book basket to read when the time was right, but who has time to study birds when you are a mother working outside the home? I recently tried to find the tri-fold without luck. However, I’m determined to look again and do the work to be a more knowledgeable host next winter.

What I’ve learned, though, is that we must pay attention to when we offer them food. As I write, it’s past April 1st, the advised deadline in New England to take down bird feeders to avoid unwelcome bear visitors, yet the bird feeders still hang in our window. Our yard is partially snow-covered, making it feel more like winter than spring, so it’s easy to pretend seasons haven’t changed. I’ve uttered, “It’s time to take them down” more than a few times, but my words go unacknowledged like a painful truth no one wants to address. Even as I say those words out of duty, I have no intention of taking the bird feeders down quite yet, although I know we won’t leave them out much longer. 

It’s a welcome change for our eyes to focus on nature. The only screen we see at that moment is the one between the window glass and the world. Yet, there is a deeper reason to examine why I resist saying goodbye to the birds and risk the real threat of a bear. I fear that I won’t be able to find my way back to myself without the birds’ help. I’ve come to realize that I rely on them for brief moments of peace that sometimes feel beyond my own ability to grasp. 

The secret the birds share with me is simplicity. For the past couple of years, I’ve found myself dreaming of living in a tiny home, owning multiples of a singular outfit, so I never have to decide what to wear, and reducing my digital footprint to near non-existence. And taking a real birdwatching trip.