Julie Zickefoose: Nature Artist & Writer
Phoebe Magic
It was the phoebe nest that did it, that made us willing to do anything to buy this property. I'm sure the seller saw it in our eyes. That worn little lump of moss and mud, plopped atop a pressure-treated 2 x 8 beneath the house's raised deck, upped our ante clear to heaven. Yes, he told us, phoebes had nested just that summer, and their cat had had a marvelous time watching the birds through the flooring as it crouched directly above them. I smiled and suppressed a scream – both Bill and I had gotten good at that in our nine months of til-now fruitless househunting in southeast Ohio. Searching for a rural property, we'd seen it all. Beautiful pieces of land, with a house that begged not for repair, but only to be bulldozed. Beautiful homes, with shiny new kitchens, that shook with each passing semi truck, or were planning a slow death march down an eroding hill. A fairly decent old farmhouse, adjoining state forest, where the neighbor boys staged a three-ring, all-terrain-vehicle extravaganza for our benefit. Rrrrrrrrr, yahoo!
And now here was this house, a pretty good house, on 40 acres of meadow and orchard and forest, with another 40 waiting to be bought, and it had the ultimate lucky sign – a nest of one of our very favorite birds right under the deck. As we walked the close-shaven meadow, I'd found a couple of bleached box turtle shells, victims of a too-low mower deck, and a too-enthusiastic mowing schedule. We'd fix that. There were problems, to be sure, with the water supply, the kitchen, the baths, and the floor plan, the stuff of future home improvement loans. For us, in that moment of discovery, the old farm with its hastily-built, 1978-vintage house shone with perfection.
That was the autumn of 1992. We moved in that December. The phoebe nest melted away in the winter rains, and every spring thereafter, a phoebe came, sometimes for a day or two, sometimes for only a couple of hours, sang its cranky, wheezy song under our deck, and flew away. We've never had a nest since. We put up little three-sided shelters under the deck, and under the garage eaves, and lay low whenever a phoebe appeared to investigate. If crossed fingers made eggs, we'd be overrun with phoebes. As I write, there is a phoebe muttering and fluttering under the deck. He's been on territory for over a week, finding song perches in the dead branches of buddleia, on plant brackets and our faded Adirondack chairs. He sits on the railing, wagging his tail, and whisking up to nab sluggish houseflies against the south-facing siding. It's the longest a phoebe has ever lingered here. I pretend to ignore him. I don't want him to see it in my eyes, how much I want him to find a mate and build a nest. I'll even make mud for them, run a hose into my flower bed, if they'll just be so kind as to slap it on a deck strut, line it with moss, and get busy. He starts singing at a few minutes after 7 each morning, starts earlier every day, and he always wakes me up. I don't mind. There's something about this drab little flycatcher that I love, unreservedly. To me, a phoebe embodies bird-spirit, that charge of life that one bird can bring to an otherwise dull day. He's always in motion, even at rest, flopping his loose-hinged tail, then whirling off to catch a flying insect. His magic has nothing to do with color; he defines drab, without even a wingbar or eye-ring for relief from his olive-brownness. But look in a phoebe's eye, and it's all there: the charm of a warbler, the zest of a kingbird. He's a lot of bird, in deceptively simple packaging.
We have a friend, of whom we're very fond, who lives not far from here. As long as he's lived in these Appalachian foothills, he's used guns to fell food, and occasionally to settle disputes. One was with a phoebe, who came one spring to put globs of wet mud atop a porch light by his front door. I wish I had a story of revelation and redemption to tell, but I don't. The phoebe lost. I think our friend made a mistake there, but perhaps the bigger mistake was in ever telling us what he'd done. I guess I have a skewed outlook on phoebes, because it would never occur to me to consider the inevitable mess beneath their nests an annoyance, much less a death sentence. It goes, part and parcel, with the joy of having phoebes around. But then, I once climbed up into my landlord's garage rafters, and hung an old umbrella upside down under a barn swallow nest, to save his truck from their copious fallout, and to spare them any possible consequences of his annoyance. Barn swallows, like phoebes, are worth it. Watch swallows skim low over the lawn in the sidelight of a summer evening; watch a phoebe whirl out and snap a passing cranefly, then fetch up on a dead branch, and then imagine the scene without their spark.
When our daughter was born, she had the spark in her eyes. As a tiny newborn, she'd whip around when anyone entered the room, and track them, holding their eyes in her smoky blue gaze. She still has them, nearly three years later, those wise eyes. An old soul, someone once said. Before I knew she was a girl, before she ever came, she had a name: Phoebe. It had belonged to a great-aunt of mine, I was told after we'd picked it. That's nice, I thought, but it's really the bird I'm naming her for. Everyone knew that. She trundles around the house, trailing cheer and color and motion; she matches me trowel for trowel in the garden; she trains plastic binoculars on the little drab bird on the deck railing. I can't imagine the house without her spark. Together, we root for the lone male phoebe, hoping he'll attract a mate with his itchy song. House deal, firstborn's name; how can a person base such momentous decisions on such a nondescript little flycatcher? You'd have to know the phoebe. 
