Fairy Birds

There’s always this fairy-like sense that I get from small birds. Wrens in particular embody this aspect fully; bumbling, fat little balls of feathers that whiz by in whirring blurs, chirping to themselves as they root around in cotoneaster and old autumn leaves. They have a foolish curiosity about them, naïve enough to look cats in the eye and tease their observers. And yet they flit away at the right moment, always just out of reach.

As a young girl, fairies were like this to me too. I knew that there was some form of magic in the world, and I desperately wanted to witness it. I built fairy houses amidst my house plants, set out beds and lodging in niches of my room, warmly invited these creatures to join me so that finally I could prove to myself that magic did indeed exist.

Now, as a fifteen-year-old, I still look for that magic, but it takes a slightly different form. I look into the eyes of animals, down in the crevices on the forest floor, between tiny capsules of juniper haircap moss and discarded snail shells. I have indeed observed miraculous enigmas in my decade-and-a-half of living. There is something deeper to our world, and it lies in the preternatural.

That’s another post, though. In this blog post I want to write about what I call “fairy” birds – the tiny, mysterious, intriguing avians of nature. There’s been a few of these birds lately that I’ve seen: yellow-breasted nuthatches, Townsend’s solitaires, and house wrens. Their ambiguous, black-marble eyes, plump bodies, and eager energy seem fairy-like to me.

Nuthatches can perch upside-down on branches and trees inspecting the bark for bugs, traversing up and down and sideways like jumping spiders. Wrens examine their world curiously, flitting in tiny cracks and crevices in structures and disappearing into any tunnels they can find. I watched one hop through a pipe on the ground and emerge out the other side, as if it had found an intriguing playground to discover.

I wouldn’t be very surprised if they managed to vanish in mid-flight, or learn to speak like a human, or settle in pine boughs for pollen-and-nectar tea parties.

But for now, they simply hold an air of the mystical, the foolishly curious, and the busybody kibitzers – oh-so-familiar behaviour with meddling little birds. It seems like only a façade, though; it’s when we’re not looking that they play their tricks, weaving the magic in the air into their striated feathers, transforming the mundane into the miraculous.