Good as Yoga . . .

How, in 59 years, could I never have noticed the precious morning murmurs of birds waking in their roosting places, wherever in the trees they are? The serenity of that sound is worth setting the alarm and waiting outside in the dark for, and makes the pre-dawn whir & peel of traffic all the more annoying, because I know it covers the first and quietest chirps. Evenso, in the lull between moving vehicles, and before the actual calls begin, those random murmurs around the yard are better than yoga for starting a day off right.

Add a good cup of steaming coffee and a pink sky of rising sun for perfection realized. As the eastern light brightens and spreads upward, so do the wake-up murmurs, until they erupt around the yard into calls identifiable by species. The first one I recognize in this yard on this week at about 7:15 has been the Carolina wren, followed almost immediately by blue jays, nuthatches, brown thrashers, a hawk, and crows. But where are the robins I expected to hear?

Of course, the whole exercise revives my ongoing question of where birds sleep at night once nesting season is over and they abandon their cradles of stick and leaf and down. Do they simply roost on an open branch? How do they escape owls and other nocturnal predators? So far my consulting of the experts has not reaped a definitive answer. dkm