House Hunting
by Patricia Valdata

The two ducks flapped into view and stretched out their legs to land on a thick gray limb of the beech tree near the window where I stood daydreaming. Astonished, I dashed for my binoculars to confirm that I really had seen a pair of ducks land in a tree. Ducks they were indeed--wood ducks, the male a cubist vision of geometrical shape and color; the female, with her blue wing patch and white teardrop eye patch, dowdy only in comparison to her overdressed mate.

The beech they landed in had housed a pair of flickers last spring. The female duck flew to the edge of the nest hole and peered in. It's a fine hole for a nest, the excavated ghost of a limb that had been dropped by a storm before we moved to these woods. But the hole is too small for a wood duck. After a second look, to make sure, the female flew to another tree, her mate following like any male accompanying his wife on a shopping expedition. They explored our woods for a full hour, she leading, landing on a fat branch to examine the tree trunk for holes, gazing up and down, looking from side to side, while her resplendent mate waited, sometimes on a nearby branch, sometimes a tree or two away.

Although our property is not the best place for a wood duck nest, it is an ideal home site for my husband and me. We were house hunting ourselves, just like the wood ducks, when we found the land. Only two acres, most of it is heavily wooded with a mix of tulip, beech, oak, and hickory trees. In spring a succession of wildflowers--bloodroot, cut-leaved toothwort, yellow violet, rue anemone, wild geranium--sprinkle pastel color on the forest floor. On the day we bought the property, while my practical husband was planning where to site the house, I was strolling with my head down, marveling at the delicate white blossoms at my feet, a minor miracle of spring.

One year later, the first morning we awoke in our new home, I looked up to see a flock of snow geese flying directly over our house. The morning was so quiet I could hear the whisper of their wing feathers, and I knew we had found the perfect place to build our own nest. Since that morning, I have watched a brown creeper spiral up a tree trunk; a Carolina wren search for insects on the woodpile; indigo buntings gather nest material; an eastern wood pewee fly from a bare branch to capture an insect on the wing; and a common yellowthroat sing in the shrubby understory. Until we moved here, I hadn't seen any of those birds before. I've also spotted red-bellied, red-headed, downy, and hairy woodpeckers, as well as a palm warbler, a male scarlet tanager, and numerous Carolina chickadees, robins, towhees, nuthatches, blue jays, cardinals, wood thrushes, and bluebirds. A few weeks ago I noticed a red-tailed hawk building a nest deep in the woods, and the other morning a pileated woodpecker landed on a tree trunk as I was looking out the window. It stopped long enough for me to confirm its big red crest in my binoculars, then flew off.

I've never lived in the woods before. Every time I look outside I feel like I'm on vacation, camping in the forest. Our house is full of windows so we can see the woods on all four sides, and it is easy to procrastinate here; I wander from window to window, watching birds when I should be working.

Unfortunately--I think--the bird calls filter only faintly through our well-insulated walls and double-glazed windows, so no dawn chorus wakes us on April mornings--although the red-bellied woodpecker drumming on the ridge vent often does. But when I eat breakfast on the screened-in porch, their morning music calls me and my cereal gets soggy while I peer through binoculars. Sometimes I think I need a second pair. I try to carry them around the house, but so often they are downstairs while I am up, and by the time I sprint downstairs to get them the unfamiliar bird I glimpsed is usually gone.

One morning a slender gray bird landed on the branch of a dogwood, not thirty feet away. At first I thought it might be the eastern wood-pewee who so often sings his monotonous little tune on summer mornings. Then the bird flew into a small beech, where he perched obligingly, facing away from me so I could see the olive tinge to his back, and the white edge to the wing feathers where they overlapped on his lower back. When he turned I caught my breath, for though his throat was gray his abdomen was solid yellow and his tail feathers reddish. He raised his head feathers into a crest and lifted his right foot several times, as though he'd stepped into something sticky. He tilted his head first one way and then the other, peering at the ground with one eye at a time, and then he flew away. A quick look in the field guide confirmed that he was a great crested flycatcher. I'd never seen one before.

I was raised in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Except for robins, cardinals, and blue jays, the city birds were colored with a limited palette--black starlings, brown sparrows, gray pigeons. Then we moved to the country, to dairy-farm land, all fields and pastures and windrows of osage-orange. My life list stood at 25 until I left the city; since that time it has grown to 254. It's a modest total, limited by the demands of work and school and home, but augmented by a bird feeder, one trip abroad, and volunteer work observing Canada goose nests for a state study. While counting eggs and observing the behavior of adults and goslings, I saw my first bobolink, orchard oriole, cedar waxwing, ring-necked duck, blue-winged teal, and gadwall.

Field guide in my pocket, I am learning the small thrill of discovery--the fun of comparing field marks on the bird in the binoculars with those in the drawing on the page, as well as the frustration of hearing a trill come from an impossibly thick-leaved tree that hides the singer no matter where I stand. I relish the lucky at-home moments--watching the palm warbler bathe in a puddle and then preen on top of the woodpile--as well as the exotic times: meeting a flock of nene in the parking lot of the ranger station halfway up Haleakala on Maui, or watching a flock of cockatoos fly past the train window on a journey out of Melbourne, Australia. I've heard the questioning call of a bobwhite, the uh-oh of a fish crow, the caroling of a wood thrush, and the moaning of a shearwater. As a beginning birder I've gone on guided warbler walks, solitary jaunts, and once I walked with a neighbor's cat, which was surprisingly effective at bringing indigo buntings and towhees into open view.

Only a few hours after the house-hunting wood ducks left for a more promising patch of woods, the flickers returned, flashing their yellow underwings among the tree trunks, landing at last on the beech that contains their old nest hole. A couple of days later the male flicker perched and sang on a dead branch a few feet from the hole. The female stood at the hole's edge, and as I watched she disappeared inside. I began to keep my binoculars within reach, and have been rewarded with seeing her head pop up now and then, or her mate land on the edge with a mouthful of food.

I hope the wood ducks found as rewarding a home as we did.

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