Yesterday, the feeders were unusually quiet. There were still a few visitors here and there, but nothing like the steady movement I had grown used to seeing throughout the summer. I found myself watching the empty perches and wondering if maybe we had reached the beginning of that seasonal change when the birds start coming less often.
It seemed possible. The days are shifting, even if only slightly, and the yard has already begun giving little hints that summer will not last forever. I had started to think that perhaps the season of constantly empty feeders, emptied by hungry little visitors almost as quickly as Brian could fill them, might already be behind us.
Then today they came back again.
They were everywhere. They moved from feeder to feeder, waited in the branches, gathered along the fence, and perched in the trees as though yesterday’s quiet had never happened. Some ate together while others waited nearby for their turn, and before long the whole area felt alive with movement again.
There was nothing particularly rare about any of them. They were the same little birds that have visited all summer, the ones that can be so easy to overlook because they have become part of the everyday landscape. But after noticing their absence yesterday, their return felt anything but ordinary.
I think that may be part of why I was so happy to see them. We become accustomed to the lives that share our spaces, sometimes without realizing how much their presence has become part of our own routines. It is often only when something familiar becomes quiet that we understand how much we had been listening for it.
Today the feeders are busy again. The branches are being used as waiting rooms, the fence has become another place to rest, and the little birds are moving between all of it as though they never left.
Maybe they never really did.
But today, I noticed that they came back. And sometimes that is enough to make an ordinary morning feel like a gift.
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