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59 Birds owing to a lifetime of bird watching, birds always grab my attention . Sometimes it is embarrassing. I might stop in mid-sentence (mine or someone else’s) to snatch a quick look, or turn my head (and my attention) at an unfamiliar sound or flash of wings. Anyone who spends time around birders gets used to it, but others react with an uncomfortable stare, or manage a thin smile and an uneasy glance, trying to reassure themselves that everything is perfectly normal and they are not in the company of a lunatic. Actually, they probably are, but as a rule birders are harmless. Birding offers the thrill of a hunt without the mess. Stalking birds in nature is like a playground dare; you move in carefully to see how close you can get, or how much you can see of the little bits of their lives before they fly off. It is titillating and difficult. But in a garden watching birds is different. There we and the birds live together in close quarters, and like all intimate partnerships we learn to tolerate each other’s foibles and bend to each other’s needs gracefully over time. It is not the thrilling chase, but the careful unveiling of habits and preferences formed by countless small moments spent together. I have found that the birds that come to share our garden with us are even more important to me than the ones I still joyously seek out in the wild to tick off my life list. When I look around it is amazing how many plants we have put in just to offer a food source or a home for various birds, and how many we left where they came up for the sake of the birds. It seems that the birds that live 60 • A Place All Our Own here all the time, or come to visit on a regular basis, have done as much to define and shape this garden as we have. They have become inseparable from the garden itself, contributing their currency as part of the wealth of a successful garden. During the earliest days of the garden, we decided to plant a pair of red fairydusters (Calliandra californica) directly in front of the two front windows . One window is over the kitchen sink, a place we were guaranteed to spend a lot of time, while the other is next to the dining table and provides a clear view of the dimpled buttes across the street. At the time, red fairyduster was fairly new on the horticulture plate; the oldest one I knew was at the Desert Botanical Garden and was well over ten years old when I got there. It still grows happily to this day near Webster Auditorium in full, unrelieved sun and blooms almost all the time. We were sure it was the perfect plant for our spot, which also has full, unrelieved sun. As an added bonus, we expected those flowers to attract hummingbirds like crazy, and endure, perhaps even thrive, on the minimal watering scheme we established for the front. Rarely do things in a garden work out so perfectly , meeting all your criteria and expectations, but so it has happened with these beloved plants. Even when the plants were small and their bloom was sparse, hummingbirds began to set up ownership of the brilliant red stamen clusters that form the flowers. A male Costa’s hummingbird was one of the first visitors, and one has lived near them ever since. How birds find new plants, or those that have just come into bloom, among all the plants that are within their realm, I cannot imagine. I think of them as little reconnaissance flyers, swirling around the neighborhood, gazing at the lay of the land, watching carefully just in case a bargain hits them in the beak. Once one hummingbird has found your yard, others are not far behind. Some scientists believe that vultures hunt this way; one bird finds the dead critter—whether the finder is a vulture or not appears to be irrelevant—and the others home in on the presence of one, or better yet a crowd, milling around on the ground. Might hummingbirds do something similar as they seek out flowering plants? I suppose they could, but if so they haven’t let on about it. As the red fairydusters grew and their bloom became more prolific and reliable, the number of hummingbirds also increased. Because here...

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