Birds on the Wire

Most people pass them without thinking about it. Just birds on a wire. But once you notice them, you start seeing them everywhere. There's almost always one up there.

Sometimes it's just a single bird. Sometimes it's a whole row of them, spaced out in a way that almost looks planned. After a while, it stops feeling random.

They don't act the same up there as they do in the yard. On the ground everything is quick. Hopping around, turning, moving from one spot to the next. Even in the trees there's constant motion. But on the wire, they slow down. A head turns. A foot shifts. Every now and then one lands a little too close and another bird shuffles over, like someone sat in the wrong seat. Mostly they just sit. It doesn't look like they're resting. It looks more like they're waiting.

It's high enough for them to see everything around them, but still close to where they want to be. Whatever the reason, it seems like a good place to pause before moving on.

I've noticed they do something similar around the birdhouses. They rarely fly straight to the entrance. They'll land on a fence, a nearby branch, or sometimes even the wire first. They sit there for a few seconds looking things over before deciding whether to go in. If something startles them, they're gone in an instant. Just as quickly, a few of them are back, landing almost exactly where they were before. Most of the time, it's the wire they return to first.

That's when I started looking at the wire a little differently. The wire isn't where they're going.

It's where they pause.

You see it throughout the day. The wire sits empty for a while, then one bird lands. Another joins it. Before long there's a whole line again, as if nothing had interrupted it in the first place.

It took me a long time to notice what they were doing.

For years I never paid much attention to any of it. I'm sure those birds were sitting on the wires back then too. I just never noticed them.

Maybe that's why I notice them now. Not because they're doing something unusual.

Because they remind me to pause once in a while too