Merilyn Simonds - Woman, Watching

The March sun wasnt yet warm enough to slump the snow when the evening grosbeaks descended on Louises feeding station. She was watching out her kitchen window, as she always did, a cup of strong coffee in hand, her reward after a vigorous bird walk at dawn, a habit of forty years that she had not yet given up, even on the cusp of ninety.

The flock of black-and-yellow birds mobbing her tray of sunflower seeds was the largest shed seen in years. For decades, shed been collecting data on evening grosbeaks for her ornithologist friend Dorishow many came to her feeder, male or female, when and where they nested, how long it took the eggs took to hatch and the young to fledge. She made a mental note to check her records to see if the numbers this spring were truly record-breaking.

Suddenly, amidst the throng, a flash of pure gold. Louise lifted her binoculars. Obviously a grosbeakthose thick seed-cracking billsbut solidly yellow, like an oversize canary.

The other birds settled back to their feeding, edging the uncanny bird off the tray whenever it tried to snatch a seed, until finally, the gilded bird rose like a wisp of pure sunshine and disappeared among the trees.

My feeder was half an hour southwest of Louises, flying as a hungry bird might, along the canopy-highway of boreal forest between her log house nestled in the pines on the edge of Pimisi Bay and my R2000 prefab, tucked into hundreds of acres of forest just south of Callander in Ontarios Near North.

Evening grosbeaks shifted across my wooden feeding tray as if by some prearranged schedule, clearly not women and children first as it was the males that were snuffling up the sunflower seeds, cracking them open and scooping out the meat with their thick, curling tongues, blackening the snow with shells.

The motorcycle gang, I called these birds, gold slashes above the eyes like cool yellow sunglasses, wings glossy as black leather jackets with a startling white blaze. My sons were at school; my husband at work. I stood alone at the sliding glass doors, counting. A hundred birds, at least.

Silvery females were jostling for seed now. Suddenly they fluttered up, a small explosion, leaving a strange golden bird alone on the tray.

The Golden Bird is one of the tales collected by the Grimm brothers. In the fable, when a king discovers golden apples missing from his orchard, he asks his three sons to watch for the thief. Only the youngest son stays awake to identify the culprita golden bird. The three sons are sent to catch the bird and bring it to the king. The two older boys ignore the advice of a fox and are distracted from their quest, but the youngest follows the animals wise counsel, endures the trials that beset him, and returns with the golden bird, thus winning the heart of the most beautiful woman in the kingdom and releasing her brother from the spell that had turned him into the fox.

The story is found in other collections, too, although the bird often changes speciesa golden blackbird in one, and in the French-Canadian version collected by Marius Barbeau, a golden phoenix. In that story, the fox is a hare, an equally mythical helper, who counsels diligence over comfort and dedication to a quest.

Nowhere is the golden bird a grosbeak, except in Louises yard and mine.

If Louise had been younger, she might have set her drop traps to catch the golden bird, banding it and releasing it in the hope that someone, somewhere, might report its fate. If she could have figured out a way to feed it apart from the bullying flock, the pure yellow grosbeak might have built a nest in her patch of woods and she would have watched the eggs hatch, the young fledge and migrate south, to the Appalachians perhaps, returning to mate again, a unique gilded strain that scientists might have named for where she lived.