When this piece started forming in my mind a few days ago, it felt like a sad story.  I was going to call it, ”A Cardinal’s Lament.”  But now I am not so sure that the drama I have been witnessing is a sad one;  it might actually be a reasonably happy tale.  I am reminded that often what I think I am seeing is different from what is actually going on.  

     For more than a week, the sleekest, reddest, most gorgeous male cardinal has been our close neighbor.  That’s the fun part.  Every chance I get, I feast my eyes on this handsome fellow–perching on our deck railing, swooping from the deck down to a tree in the orchard, or balanced miraculously atop a tall, thin mullein plant.  I adore him.

     But  something this gorgeous little guy has been doing has disturbed my husband Andy and me.  What distresses us is his singular obsession of banging into our downstairs windows.  Every morning, when we get up, we hear him at it downstairs, flying against one window or another and hitting it with his feet.  And he persists with these attacks throughout the day!  We surmise that our cardinal friend sees his reflection in the glass and takes it for a rival who must be vanquished. 

      Between hits, the little guy may flit to a nearby branch, where he perches until it’s time to go at his ’rival’ again.  Sometimes he flies farther into the forest.  There, he may perch on a branch and sing for a little while.   And I mean sing.  These are not the usual chipping sounds that cardinals typically make, but a full-throated, sweet, sweet warble. 

      After a few trilling tunes that must surely be irresistible to any female in the vicinity (they have certainly won my heart), he is silent.  He may cock his head to one side, and then to the other, as if to say, “Wasn’t I good?  Any ladies out there?”  Some more sweet trills.  And then, you know, back to window duty. 

     That’s it, I thought.  He’s lonely, and he’s calling for a mate!  Maybe his obsession with getting rid of all the other imagined  males is distracting him from going for what he really wants.  All this window bashing is leaving him little time to pursue a mate!

     I had to help him.  Reasoning that he would quit hurling himself at the glass if he couldn’t see his reflection in it, I taped newspaper onto the downstairs windows.   Silence.  Minutes passed.   I felt hopeful.  “I think the newspaper is wor–” I exclaimed  to Andy, only to be interrupted by the all-too familiar hit against the glass.

     Only then did I realize that my taping the newspaper to the inside of the glass hadn’t prevented the bird from seeing his reflection!  I would have to put the papers on the outside instead to keep him from seeing himself!  Bother.   The windows are harder to reach from outside, and I would have to secure the paper from wind and rain.  

     I had to admit that, while I didn’t want this dear little bird to exhaust–or maybe even hurt– himself trying to drive away non-existent rivals, I also didn’t want him to go away.  I love having him around.  How I would miss that dear little face peeking in over the window sill, as he perches just outside, looking this way and that.    

     Why, why,why, I wondered, was there no female cardinal around?  I remembered seeing, not much more than a week ago, a female perched in a tree in the nearby forest with a bow-shaped twig or plant stem in her beak.  I assumed she had been in nest-building mode.  Could she have been this fellow’s mate?  But I hadn’t seen her since that day.  Did something happen to her?

     Then yesterday morning I spent some time outside just looking and listening.  From my own perch on a log at the edge of the driveway, I spotted movement among the brush on the other side of the driveway.  It was a female cardinal!  On the ground, she was flitting about, mostly hidden among all the green growth.  Had I not been watching actively, I would not have noticed her.    Maybe she was searching for ingredients for her nest! 

     Then I remembered the words of a master gardener I had consulted about the male’s behavior.   “By the way,” he emailed me, “if he finds a mate, he will be even more territorial.”

     So now I am thinking that our beautiful little red friend is the valiant, but not too bright, mate of the female who is busily building her nest.  While she works, preparing for their family-to-be, maybe he is protecting her from any possible interlopers, keeping her for himself. 

     At any rate, neither Andy nor I now see the male’s behavior as painful or unhappy for him.  He’s a ‘man on a mission,’ so to speak.  He has a full-time job doing what a male cardinal is supposed to be doing this time of year!–April Moore

This entry was posted on Friday, May 15th, 2009 at 9:04 am and is filed under Celebrating our beautiful Earth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.