For several years after I bought and moved into Casa Kittling, I'd spy this tiny little bird flitting from palo verde to sumac to fairy duster. I could never get a good look at it. Extremely shy, it would usually sit in the depths of a tree or bush and chit away at me like I'd done it some unimaginably horrible slight.
Finally, I learned that these little birds were verdins, one of the most characteristic birds of the desert, and they have one notable distinction: they are not closely related to any other bird in the western hemisphere.
It took me years before I could take an acceptable photograph of one, but I'm not saying that the ones I'm sharing today are all that acceptable, they just show the behavior of one little verdin that I named Wilbur.
Until recently, we used to have an evaporative cooler (commonly referred to as a swamp cooler here) that used open windows and water to keep the house cool. It did a wonderful job until monsoon season, which is when the humidity goes up here in the desert. Once it was monsoon season, it was time to turn on the air conditioning. One of the reasons why I loved having a swamp cooler is because you could have the windows open. I hate being shut up in the house all the time.
Well... one young verdin-- Wilbur-- liked the swamp cooler, too, and he got in the habit of coming to talk to me every day as I sat here in the office at the computer.
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| Wilbur looking to see if I was sitting at my desk. |
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| You in there, Cathy? |
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| Wilbur would cling to the screen, enjoying the cool breeze and chirping happily away at me. (This photo reminded me to clean the screen!) |
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| Some of the other verdins seemed to think Wilbur was a bit Looney Tunes. |
Since then, the verdins' shyness around me seemed to evaporate, due largely in part to Wilbur, I would assume. I've witnessed more than one adult taking its children around the back garden to show them how to get nectar out of the hummingbird feeders and where the best places are to get nice, juicy bugs. I sometimes wish we could turn back the clock and use the swamp cooler again. (Neither Denis nor I want him climbing up on the roof to do maintenance!) Something tells me that, if we did, I'd have a tiny little friend coming for a daily chat with me at the window once more.
