This is an opinion column

My husband and I joke that the kids are eating us out of house and home. Our own human kids left the nest decades ago, but generations of birds have flocked to our feeders, cleaned them out with their little beaks, and gone on to other neighbors’ feeders, too, in an all-you-can eat frenzy.

The woman at the bird seed store says it’s just that time of year. Babies have been born. Nests have been built. Humans joke about thin people “eating like a bird,” but if people ate like our backyard birds do, they’d have to go on diets and get personal trainers.

She also said that COVID was a bad thing, obviously, but a good thing for birds. While people were trapped at home, they looked out at the world from their windows and discovered what was there all along: birds, beautiful birds.

While students were learning remotely, they got bored, masked up, and came to Birds Unlimited to start a new hobby: bird feeding. They’ve kept it up. Once you start, the birds know where to find you and where their next meal is coming from.

My husband and I were late to bird feeding, but my parents were feeders long before it was a popular hobby. They tried to get me interested, too, but I just glanced through their bird books and drove off with my cool friends to have real fun. Birdwatching was for old people.

Now that I am one, I have a new appreciation for what my parents did so long ago. I now know that caring for birds brings out the best qualities in people. We become nurturing if we see a baby bird that’s fallen out of the nest or when we feel the twigs and leaves in our mailbox that signify a nest building in progress.

Over the years, we’ve had mailmen who were indifferent to the nest in the mailbox and slammed the mail on top of the tiny eggs. But one year our mailman let us put an extra mailbox on the porch to hold the mail just long enough to let the fledgelings develop and move out on their own to start the process all over again.

Birdwatchers develop favorites, and who doesn’t love the hummingbird, that tiny buzz -in-your-face creature whose wings flap so fast you’re not sure they’re real. Maybe this bird’s some tiny wind-up toy hovering above the red sugar water feeder. My son-in-law admires the mechanics of their flight and their athleticism. If you spy them, hovering in the air like a mirage, you have to wonder how they do it.

A friend and longtime birder says his earliest memory is listening to the mockingbird’s song outside his kitchen door on a hot summer morning in his childhood. When he hears that song now in the woods where he lives, it takes him back to that time and gives him such joy.

And maybe that’s the point. We can’t solve the problems of the world, or even our little part of it. But we can put out some seed, admire a flash of red when a cardinal zooms in to feed, and watch him as he flies away above it all. Who hasn’t wanted to do that?

Beth Thames can be reached at [email protected]