Winter Happy Hour for the Birds

At daybreak, there are hundreds of robins above the sidewalks: robins coming to town, leaving town, staying, and all of them are eating hackberry fruit. Gobbling, gorging on hackberries.

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Cedar waxwings are named for the Eastern red cedar fruit they rely upon, and for the red tips on secondary wing feathers.

This is a bumper year and birds know. Robin throats are busy with cheers and chirrs and yeeps and cucks, and there are cedar waxwings, too, whistling way up where the sun touches the tops of trees. I doubt birds can sound happier.

Every winter morning starts with a happy hour. Not just for me—happy to be out of bed and onto the sidewalk—but for the birds. After a long, cold and hungry night, they are ready for a breakfast buffet.

BIRD FOOD Here in my Nashville neighborhood, breakfast for robins is heavy on the hackberry but also Eastern red cedar, American holly, winterberry, a few spicebush and sumac, and today I found some withered pokeweed on the interstate bridge. There is mistletoe in the American elms, Virginia creeper in the trash alley, coralberry in a neighbor’s yard and the black chokeberry I planted in mine.