Angelkeep hadn’t had enough of auld lang syne. First snowflakes struck prior to Thanksgiving. Sweet Gwen celebrated. She stood alone in the bliss. It not only became the first snowflake of the season, but the first ground cover.
Birds huddled in the lilac bush yet holding green summer leaves. The leaves were flocked in snow. The lilac offered some protection from wind and “the white falling stuff.”
Parents of several types of birds brought their new fledglings to the feeders beside that lilac with instructions on the where and how, with assurance that food would always be available. Fledglings liked being spoon-fed and fluttered their wings. They chirped. A beak gaped wide for a morsel. After a short training period the adults left the juveniles to their own survival. This all happened in warm weather with the sun also shining.
Angelkeep imagined the thoughts and chirp conversation among the feathered friends caught up in their first experience of snowfall.
“The sky is falling. The sky is falling,” a female cardinal seemed to say as she huddled beneath a clump of lilac leaves wearing a white toboggan cap. She cried out, “Mommy. Daddy. Help!”
A male cardinal perched on a nearby limb cowered beneath a single leaf. It held a solitary snowflake at its beak’s base, near its right eye. Perhaps it appeared there as a remnant of a tear of terror for the cold white stuff blowing in every direction. It previously never saw anything like it.
He too cried out for parental instruction on how to deal with this new unspeakable adversary of life. His head snapped left and right. Up. Down. He studied the situation. He wondered why his parents left him behind with no education as to how to deal with this frightening white calamity.
A jay commanded an upper lilac branch. Being larger they demanded the first, the most, and the best of everything. It remained hard for the male cardinal to determine if the cold turned one of his kind to blue feathers, or if the blue colored bird was one of the flock that Ma and Pa Cardinal had warned about being allowed priority access to the feeder.
The blue-feathered-one outshouted every cardinal. “Mommy-J. Daddy-J. Where are you? I need you now. My blue feathers are being covered with a white fleece. My beautiful blue is beginning to look like my belly and underwings. What am I to do? Where are you? I need you to pick off this white shawl. Other yearling blue jays are beginning to laugh at me and call me ‘Whitey.’ It’s awful. So humiliating. Why didn’t you tell me this could happen?”
Following blue’s plea, he belted out a squawk. The loud squelch loosened one white snow clump from a leaf nearby. Snow dropped on his head like a crystal bomb. The shock sent him “off into the wild white yonder.”
An alarmed cardinal below stared cross-eyed at the clump of white that fell onto its own beak. It blotted out all yellow. The cardinal blew. Puff. Again. Pifft. The white would not go. “I shall die,” he cried. “My cold frozen beak will never be able to break open a sunflower seed again. Oh, the humanity.”
“Hey, sissy-bird. Don’t cry. Duh! I’m your sister. Remember me?” asked a female on the feeder frantically looking for a sunflower seed that remained all in black, sans the cold white stuff. “Come have a seed with me. It’s probably our last meal. The white stuff must be the dooms day fallout warned about by that Gospel-crying, black-coated, preacher of the wood. He always crowed about ‘final days’ here at Angelkeep. You know, Angelkeep. It’s on the mailbox.”
“Hey, come down here,” cried out a junco. “There’s plenty to eat off the ground. I’m from up north. We’re used to white flakes. We migrate to keep up with them. I just flew in yesterday in front of a snowstorm. That’s what the white is. Snow. It’s like gravy on a sunflower seed. That’s the way I see it, anyhow. It adds moisture to each bite making it easier to swallow.”
“No way,” the female cardinal replied. “I can see it’s already turned your belly white. You look like you’ve been dipped in white paint. You are so doomed.”
“Hey, Gwen, come here and look at the snowstorm with me. I swear the birds are talking to each other. Maybe I best lay off the Starbucks Expresso for a day. I should get my eyes tested. The outdoors has gone black and white on me. Overnight.”
Mr. Daugherty is a Wells County resident who, along with his wife Gwen, enjoy their backyard and have named it “Angelkeep.”
