The cheerful, tiny Bewick’s wrens are some of my favorites of the bird world. One of the things I’ve been doing lately is keeping a small suet cake inside and breaking a little off with the edge of a spoon, taking it outside, and smushing it into crumbs on a wooden box out there where they like to go check out whether the woodpecker working away above on another cake in a holder left any gleanings yet; it’s just a step or two outside the glass door. I often make two little taps with the spoon as if to call them to dinner, hoping for a little Pavlovian effect. I can play woodpecker too.
Today I was still at the smushing stage when, to my surprise, one of the Bewick’s swooped by in an arc right past where I was bending over, then quickly away to the edge of the patio, waiting expectantly. Then swooping in to eat as soon as I stepped back inside the door.
And here’s the thing, the most mindboggling thing to me: as it zipped by, I HEARD IT SINGING.
Not the whole song, just a flash of cheerful loud–loud!–notes that disappeared fast between its motions and mine and the near-instant distance away. They’re not only cute–but wow, what a voice!
To the engineers at Sonic Innovations hearing aid company, if you ever see this, thank you for giving me a memory I never expected, with a now-110 dB hearing loss at 8Khz, could be possible again. Wow!