My Visiting Birds & "The Last Song"

The photograph atop this blog entry was taken a little over a month ago on July 8th 2016. It features a very young American Robin spending time atop a table that I have in my urban (NYC) rooftop garden. In the picture he/she is standing alongside saucers that I fill with pomegranates, blueberries, raspberries, currants and raisins. It is one of my small ways of saying thank you to the array of birds that visit my place.

I am very grateful for this opportunity; and observing this baby robin test his/her ability to begin to use his/her wings (as he/she is doing in the images posted below) was truly rewarding.

I watched the young robin (fledging?) from behind a window in an effort to give him/her privacy while he/she experimented in discovering how to use his/her body parts. The expression on the face of this sweet bird caused me to think that he/she was receiving direction from a parent, but I did not notice an adult near the premises, although there were a number of occasions in which an adult robin did visit here.

I have not seen this little robin for a number of days now, however, I still continue to put out goodies for him/her and the members of the avian community, an act that makes me recall the following lyrics from The Last Song (by Edward Bear).

“Did you know I'd go to sleep

And leave the lights on

Hopin' you'd come by…”

Whenever a given bird has visited me for a number of days in a row, I have a sense of loss during their absence. This something I discussed in a prior post, a post that included what I learned from Jane Goodall (regarding my emotions under these circumstance). I'm making an effort to understand that my role in the life of an avian creature that happens to visit me, is to provide them with accommodations to meet his/her needs, and give him/her the confidence and security to carry on with their lives.

As of this date, the bird types which I've seen here (in order of their appearance) are cardinals, house finches, mourning doves, blue jays, sparrows, tufted tit mouses, dark-eyed juncoes, a lone chickadee, downy woodpeckers, common grackles, a lone white-breated nuthatch, a lone rose-breasted grosbeak, a number of pigeon varieties, a lone Baltimore oriole, European starlings, Northern mockingbirds, a lone American Goldfinch and American Robins.

Cam, a female cardinal who visited my place on a regular basis convinced me to help her to write  a series of books re the plight of these bird types. Her book Words In Our Beak Volume One (pictured below) was published  in Apple's iBooks and iTunes store in June of 2015.

ADDENDUM FALL 2018: 

The non-hardcover version (or versions)  of Volume One within the Words In Our Beak book series that are mentioned in this entry may only remain available for a limited time, but hardcover versions of Volume One, Two and Three can now be found wherever books are sold. Please click here to go to my blog post that provides details as to where you can get these books.

MY BOOK SERIES

Additionally, I have rendered some images from these books into other formats and they are available via Fine Art America (FAA). Some of my other photographs (Black & White Collection, Kaleidoscopic Images and the famous Mandarin duck who visited NYC) can also be found on my FAA pages.