Here is male Ruby-crowned Kinglet. Isn't he a charming bird, with his soft colors, white circle around his eyes, streaks of wing-white and ruby-crown? Kinglets are one of the tiniest North American birds weighing only a few ounces —front to back only a few inches. I was introduced to these marvelous birds a few weeks ago when sitting in a friend's garden where the electric company had come through and without warning took down the seventy year old White Pine trees along her backyard border. Deprived of the insects harbored in the pine trees, the Kinglets were foraging in the leaf and pine-needle litter. Then a few days later I discovered what seemed to be a whole flock of Kinglets feasting on late summer Oenothera seeds (Evening Primrose) in the cemetery garden where I volunteer.
Seldom at rest, even hanging upside down to find hidden insects, Kinglets are such high energy birds, they cannot do without food for even a very short time in order to stay alive.
Kinglets lay two broods each year, filling a soft cup-like nest with upwards of twelve lightly speckled eggs. While they are hardy little birds, (like Chickadees) their winter mortality rate is high. We might expect that when they migrate to California this year they will suffer all the more as so many miles of forest burned during the summer. No trees, no insects, no Kinglets. It's hard being a bird.
But perhaps the most delightful bit of information about Kinglets is that they sing on their way back north in the spring. Their song is described as a kind of loud and complex chattering. Psalm 100:1 says "Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth." Kinglets seem in some way to understand, do I? That doesn't mean I have to join the church choir. Some folks sing in the shower. Some folks sing while doing housework or preparing meals, jogging or taking walks.
Do I ever sing hymns along my own life-way? In the wonderful 1985 film, A Trip to Bountiful, widowed Carrie Watts lives in a one bedroom Houston apartment with her son, Ludie, and nagging daughter-in-law Jessie Mae. Jessie Mae hates and forbids hymn-singing in the apartment —"Hymn-singing makes me nervous," she complains to Mother Watts. A God-loving woman, Carrie has to get out of that apartment and back to her girlhood home, Bountiful, where she intends to work the land with her girlhood friend Callie Davis, and where she'll be free to sing to her heart's content, "Softly and Tenderly Jesus is Calling," "We Shall Gather at the River" and "Blessed Assurance".
The Ruby-crowned Kinglet sings on its way north. How wonderful is that!?
