The Birds Came Back. Where will they go?

The birds finally came to our yard. For the last two months we have had two feeders in the yard, one hangs from a hook extending about eighteen inches from the house and is attached to the kitchen window frame, and the other, hung later, when no birds came to the first feeder, hangs from an apple tree in the yard, about forty-five feet from the house. Through all of June and most of July, the only birds that came were two brave black-capped chickadees who bounced to and from the feeder hanging from the apple tree, but they hardly put a dent in the level of the seed in the feeder. Then we went away for nineteen or twenty days and returned to find both feeders empty, but still no birds for two days. Then, finally, as if an invitation had been spread to the entire state, our yard was atwitter with those old courageous black-capped chickadees as well as house finches, what I think are song and/or house sparrows, red-breasted nuthatches, and four bluejays who decided to join the party following an afternoon thunderstorm. Chirping and singing and calling and munching, dashing off and flying their horizontally wavering flights parallel to the earth through the yard, into the neighbor's, even flitteringly resting on the rocking chairs on the front porch. It is said that the frequency of bird song lies in the middle of the range of human hearing. Some hypothesize that human hearing developed in this specific range so that it would be attuned to the song of birds, for where there are birds, there is most likely water and food. This is what has been concerning me for the last two months. Is the yard of my home, the yard in which my young child plays, is it void of life? Is this why the birds shy away? So my joy at seeing the birds today, at hearing their song, at drawing the attention of my son to their feathered fluttering, at getting the bird book back out and the casual binoculars, was seemingly disproportionately gleeful. There was an inner warmth stirred in me that somehow made me feel that things in the world were ok- contrary to the threats of nuclear war, to the aggression and death in Virginia, to the general insecurities in the social, political and global arena. There is a nobility and a surety in even the most fleeting and flitting head tilting song bird, small as they may be. Over the next few days, the doves decided it was finally safe to come over and peck at the fallen seeds on the ground below the feeder after weeks of watching from the electricity wires strung just beyond our property line. Then, two days ago I woke, my son and I made our groggy way to the kitchen to greet the birds outside the window and begin our morning rituals of oatmeal and coffee, trucks and dishes, and there, on the decades old, leaning, nearly falling over aged grey farm fencing that may have served as a corral of some sort in the early twentieth century when the house was built, there on the horizontal rail of a fence defying gravity, was a hawk, casually resting, studying our yard in no hurry, most likely a young red-tail, though my birding skills are still in the developing amateur stage. Our yard had gone from a barren landscape to a wildlife refuge. We've now settled in to the activity in our yard, the birds seem quite happy and unthreatened, as do the squirrels and bunnies. We devoted attention to our yard, to make it beautiful and safe and full of food for small animals, but we also devoted attention to the future, to the world in which we were hoping to live. Attention to a world where the song of birds assured us that life indeed did thrive here. Their songs fill our mornings and our days, our hearing more acute, as we eat our oatmeal and drink our coffee and wait for the hawk to return, to perch on our fence, to show us it is still standing, and something mysterious is still working in the world and it is good.