At a little fall festival in Hermantown, Minnesota this week-end we gathered, setting up displays despite early snow squalls, and so the families with children were slow to arrive while the artisans came to warm themselves repeatedly around a couple of fire bowls bright with rust and stamped-out crescent moon and star shapes. Near our display was a crab apple tree as apple-studded as any I had seen, not too far from the nearer fire. All hours of the show a quiet huddle of cedar waxwings, many of them young birds with rumpled brown plumage or the grey streaking that set them apart from the flannel-sleek adults remained in the tree. The apples looked a bit large for songbirds the size of waxwings to deal with whole but, except for a little pecking, I saw the birds mostly sitting like spectators, little or not at all noticed by the humans below, the birds blended into the center of the fruit tree. I wondered if the fire's warmth reached them or if the people and movement were an attraction for them just to watch us all. I think wild birds do a lot of people-watching. In winter the best rural birding is often nearest the houses with feeders and the windbreak and shelter offered by our walls fringed with plantings.

Because of the crisp weather and low customer flow I did a lot of sitting at work drawing fantasy birds of my own, an ivory-billed woodpecker providing a sort of sapsucker with intensive oral care. The idea had come to me at a recent stint in the dentist's chair. As a person little encumbered by formal scientific training in my approach to the birds, I deeply respect studied interpretations of their behavior but feel free to add emotion to my portrayals of birds. I don't much care if I'm anthropomorphizing, since I think the back edges of the human crowd are well-served by folk who project their personal feelings and daydreams onto the images of birds. It could be agreed by some people that no homo sapiens kiddies pictured in ads or wherever, and precious few adult figureheads, tribal leaders, business spokesfolk, etc. are as cute and as expressive of our souls or our  wish-fulfillment as the figures of roosting or foraging birds. See possible examples at   www.etsy.com/shop/EpiphaniesAfield