Pilgrims in our own backyard

June 8, 2006

Dear Patty,

In "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek," Annie Dillard wrote of rediscovering the divinity in the natural world by opening herself to it. She likened the experience to sightless people who suddenly can see after having a surgery. One described the first tree she'd ever seen as "the tree with the lights in it."

Dillard writes: "Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw a backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance."

Reminders of the wonder all around don't always happen breathlessly. DC and I spent the past few weeks nursing four orphaned robin chicks, keeping them warm with a lightbulb and injecting a vegetable porridge down their gullets as often as we could. Quickly some grew bigger and more insistent about being fed. Ultimately two made the leap to avian adolescence.

When the day came to release them, DC took their cage into the backyard and opened the door. One flew into the tree overhead. The other hardly moved.

For days we put its cage in the backyard during the day and opened the door. Curiously, the robin already in the trees flew down to the cage when we arrived and shared in the vegetable soup.

One day at feeding time the free bird swooped down from a tree and landed on my shoulder. It felt as if this tiny bird had given me a great gift -- its trust.

Of course, baby birds have been known to imprint a box pulled by a string.

We worried they'd become too dependent on us so I went to a bait store for some night crawlers. The birds switched to solid food, if worms can be called that, easily.

Eventually the reluctant bird flew up into the trees, too, but they didn't forget about us. They flew down whenever DC and I went into the backyard, perhaps because we kept feeding them. When we were gone one day they flew next door to our friend Robyn's porch and were fed.

We decided to quit feeding them, and three weeks after coming to live with us the robins are taking care of themselves now. Sometimes we still see them sitting on the fence.

They seem to be watching over us now.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is managing editor of the Southeast Missourian.