THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, March 21, 1995 TAG: 9503210291
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: GUY FRIDDELL
LENGTH: Medium: 64 lines
Imagine my delight in learning that a few bluebirds stay hereabouts all winter. Any place they are is a kind of permanent spring.
``My heart leaps up,'' William Wordsworth wrote, ``when I behold a rainbow in the sky.''
I will match him bluebird to rainbow any day of the week.
Rainbows vary in intensity; the azure-coated, rose-breasted bluebirds are ethereal always.
The bluebird, another poet wrote, bears the sky on its back and the earth on its breast.
Some bluebirds winter near the airport in Suffolk. Three or so years ago the citizenry issued a list of items about Surprising Suffolk but left off year-round bluebirds.
Word of the bluebirds came from Lois Lawrence, who put out 13 bluebird boxes 10 years ago.
A pair of bluebirds set up housekeeping in one box; chickadees and goldfinches occupy the other 12.
I'd settle for that.
The chickadee is a cheerful, nifty bird in a jaunty black beret and bib. As for the goldfinch, or wild canary, it has jet black wings and cap, and the rest of it is brilliant, well nigh blinding yellow.
You get goldfinches and bluebirds in the same yard and you have a show that would shake up Wordsworth and make him forget rainbows.
During the winter, 10 bluebirds are around Lois' yard near the airport, feeding, not so much in a flock as just hanging out together.
The 10 bluebirds' main abode - all my life I been wanting to use ``abode'' and there, by George, it is - an old 56-foot-tall windmill.
They stay out of the wind in a windmill. Can't you see all that color, like a shook kaleidoscope, breaking up the gloom in the mill, flitting in and out?
Spring comes and they disperse. Two of them - Lois thinks it's the same pair, and so do I - take over the box yet again.
They are an ideal couple, building the nest together, and then while she broods on the eggs, he brings food. As she is hatching the season's second brood, he helps the young of the first brood learn to feed. A model father, God wot!
For family values, you can't beat the bluebird.
And what a valiant fellow he is, protecting his home against bigger, intrusive birds, flying at them scolding, even defying cats and humans that near the nest.
A tiny D'Artagnan!
To sing, it don't get up on the fence and yell ``Figaro! Figaro! Figaro!'' like the mockingbird who fills the air with arias.
The bluebird's voice is a sweet murmuring of a few contralto notes. In the spring you generally hear it a few days before you see the bird.
Clayton Nugent told me Sunday that he and his wife, Betsy, had heard the bluebirds on the Princess Anne Golf Course.
John Burroughs noted that ``the bird is generally a mere disembodied voice, a rumor in the air for two or three days before it takes visible shape before you.'' ILLUSTRATION: Drawing
A bluebird
by CNB