Just before dark on New Year’s Eve, I filled all the bird feeders, and I didn’t skimp on the good stuff: black nyjer thistle for the finches, two kinds of suet for the woodpeckers, whole peanuts for the crows and the blue jays, a high-protein woodland mix dense with shelled peanuts and sunflower hearts for everybody. The birds would wake to a New Year’s feast. I thought of it as the avian equivalent of black-eyed peas and greens, which the humans in the house would be eating for good luck later in the day. In 2025 we will be needing all the luck we can get.
I confess I wasn’t thinking only of the birds when I set out that banquet. According to birding tradition, the first bird you see on New Year’s morning is your theme bird for the year. It’s a game, really, not a true tradition, but it can be instructive to ponder what that first bird’s traits might teach us about the world or ourselves, and I was seeding the field for a fine first bird. A crow for wit and wile, perhaps? A wren for curiosity? A house finch for sociability or a goldfinch for renewal?
There is so much natural food in our yard — drupes and berries and grubs and the like — that I don’t hang out bird feeders except during winter. Even then, visits to our feeders are scant, except in the early mornings. If I took care to put my glasses on before I pulled the curtains open, I would see my first bird well enough to identify it. Some years I forget, and my first bird is a blur of wings and a departing rump.
On the very coldest mornings, birds tend to be both still and quiet, conserving energy to keep warm. Last year I looked for an hour before I saw my first bird. This New Year’s Day dawned very cold, too, and the wind, though light, was bitter. I saw no birds when I opened the bedroom curtains, but I had better luck peering through the glass of the back door: Two northern cardinals — a male and a female — were sheltering in a dead sapling beside our deck.
The tree died two years ago in a sudden drop in temperature after a long warm spell that had sent sap rising as in springtime. We leave the snag standing because our wild neighbors have so many uses for it. For squirrels and opossums, it’s a ladder onto the deck, where there is often spilled birdseed. That morning the redbirds were using its trunk as a windbreak. In any ecosystem, wild creatures always have as many uses for death as for life.
Male cardinals’ vibrant red color, black mask and jaunty crest are beloved among even those who have little interest in birds, but I prefer the more muted colors of the females. This one was impossible to photograph among the drab branches of the dead tree, but her mate was keeping watch over her, and she was likewise keeping watch over him.
Cardinals have many symbolic associations that make them especially resonant first birds on New Year’s Day. For Christians, they represent the blood of Christ and therefore sacrifice and redemption. The persistence of their pair bond across seasons and the male’s courtship ritual of feeding the female have made them symbols of devotion. The bereaved often believe the appearance of a cardinal means a loved one is sending a message of reassurance from the beyond, a reminder in grief that those we love have not left us entirely. That we are not alone in a cold, lonely world.
But as I watched these cardinals on New Year’s morning, I didn’t think first of symbols. At the dawn of a year that seems almost certain to make this country into an unrecognizable place, to make this world even less hospitable to birds and everybody else, it turns out I am less interested in symbolic associations than in practicalities.
The new administration, led by a felon who tried to overturn the results of a fair election, has pledged to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants, using military force if necessary, and end constitutionally protected birthright citizenship. He intends to permit more drilling on federal lands and to roll back regulations designed to limit environmental toxins and greenhouse gases. And all of that is only the beginning.
Seeing those cardinals watching over each other, I wondered: What can I, too, do to be more watchful? To take more care?
A heavy snow 10 days ago brought birds out in huge numbers, often in whole flocks — bluebirds, robins, cedar waxwings, house finches, dark-eyed juncos and Carolina wrens, plus the usual mockingbirds and blue jays, tufted titmice and Carolina chickadees, every kind of sparrow and every kind of woodpecker. I kept the feeders filled. My husband spread a sheet on top of the snow and set out a mix of seeds and nuts and mealworms for the ground foragers.
This bounty also brought the mixed flock of black birds I always look for in snow — starlings and grackles and red-winged blackbirds — who compete for resources during the breeding seasons but band together in the cold. In such weather, they waste little energy in squabbling.
Their cooperation wasn’t symbolic any more than the cardinals on New Year’s Day were merely a symbol. Most songbirds are less territorial in winter because the hormones responsible for breeding behavior have not yet begun to rise. They cooperate as compensation for leafless trees and cold temperatures, working together to find food sources and evade predators, staying warm by flocking up.
Birds don’t exist to serve as symbols, and yet they can’t help but mean something to the symbol-making species watching them through a window or a storm door. On this Inauguration Day that brings no hope for help from elected officials to address climate change or to protect vulnerable species, including our own, the living world is showing us what to do: In the dark days already gathering, we will need to do our best to look out for one another and for the creatures we love.
