This spring we have Cowbirds at the birdfeeding
table.
While I sit quietly in the mornings, on the
sofa by the big front window, and watch all the avian families still come feed
as they find mates and grow small soft living eggs within their soft bellies, I
watch these birds who can so easily be demonized.
Cowbirds
have normal bird lives with the exception of the way in which they lay their
eggs in various neighborhood nests of others. They're just wired that way.
Their eggs are cared for by others, unsuspecting or no, and when they
hatch, they are genetically designed to push the other eggs or baby birds out
of that nest, and be fed and grow big and strong, often bigger than the adoptive
parents, while the Cowbird parents go off and do who knows what.
Seems
wrong, doesn't it? Until you realize that it's simply how life develops and
grows.
Somehow,
whenever I see their beautiful black feathers with the rich brown hood, I
slowly move from distaste....to imagining being them. Being born all kinds of
things, right? A slug or a flea or an Eagle or a …Cowbird.
That song my kids
sang when young shows up in my mind: "All God's children got a place in
the choir. Some sing low; some sing high. Some sing outside on the telephone
wire. And some just clap their hands, paws, and anything they got, now."
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