Chickadees

photo by Marie Read

Chickadees

The nature calendar photograph above my desk depicts

two black-capped chickadees riding the carcass of a sunflower. 

The bird above is perched on a straw-colored, bowed stem,

its tiny feet barely able to grasp the thickness enough to find purchase. 

Behind its chevroned back is a desiccated leaf, dark brown, 

hanging pendulous from the far edge of the stem. 

One can almost see the leaf tremble in its fragility and precariousness. 

The second chickadee is poised upside down 

beneath the nodding head of the flower, clinging 

by its right foot talons - if you can call chickadee feet 'talons' - 

holding fast to the remaining sunflower seeds, which seem to be half gone. 

The bird is horizontal below the seed-head and has one sunflower seed 

still encased in the shell, clasped in its tiny black beak. 

I can see the whole of its snowy white underbelly. 

The photo's background is a blur of yellow and orange blotches 

punctuated with specks of white blur that might be snow. 

Maybe that's why it's the picture for February. 

Also maybe because there are two birds 

and those assembling the calendar thought: this is a pair, 

a couple of lover chickadees who are bonded, a Valentine's symbol of romance. 

This is a date: one bird has invited its mate to the sunflower restaurant for 

a romantic dinner of seeds from a dead flower-head, somehow 

left over from late summer and, beyond disbelief, has managed 

to last until February in the snow. It seems suspiciously unlikely to me. 

Birds may appear to be monogamous to the average person, 

but I'm convinced they too fuck around. 

From a distance and at a glance the picture looks almost like 

one chickadee looking at its own reflection in an unseen mirror, 

a pool of still water, or frozen puddle, but there's the slight difference in their stance, 

plus a seed in the beak and, of course, the flower head between them. 

But maybe that's what love is anyway: finding another that serves as a mirror, 

with a slightly different stance, clinging to a meager nourishment, 

the remnants of summer, as a withered leaf shudders in the icy wind, 

the chill of dead flowers the only thing between you and your other self, reflecting.

~Andrine de la Rocha

February 2025