The Bird Lady

Lois Ehlert was one of Emma’s early favorite authors and illustrators. She does beautifully simple and colorful drawings of nature and has an engaging way of weaving stories about nature. Emma loved these books for their pictures and stories, but also for the opportunity they gave her to study and memorize something from nature.

Her first favorite by Lois Ehlert was Feathers for Lunch. The book tells the story of a cat who stalks all the various kinds of birds that inhabit his family’s backyard. There are pictures of robins, chickadees, blue jays, cardinals, wrens, goldfinches and more. When she was not much more than a year old, Emma committed all these birds to memory and could identify them not just in the book, but also in our yard. The one little quirk was that, for a time, she would refer to a robin as Christopher Robin. As I’ve noted before, Emma was also a fan of A.A. Milne.

Emma’s Auntie Meg recently told me that she was thrilled when she discovered that Emma could identify species of birds. Meg was a little bit of an Audubon nerd, I mean buff, an Audubon buff, and she said was dismayed that people in my family would refer to birds as “the little gray one”, or “the pretty blue one”. Emma gave her hope that the next generation of my family had a brighter ornithological future.

I’m not sure when it happened, but I would like to point out that many people in my family are now quite adept at identifying different species of birds. My mom has a bird feeder outside her window in the nursing home and as we sit and watch the birds together, I have not once heard someone refer to a cardinal as “the pretty red bird”. I guess Meg and Emma inspired us.