By Gary Topping–
We love our backyard, which is carved out of a wooded mountainside just outside the mouth of Big Cottonwood Canyon. There is a low, split-level deck which is great for cookouts or just lounging, and we often find ourselves spending more time out there than inside the house in the summertime. In fact, we often leave both the back and front doors open, so that outside and inside become one.
And we have turned our backyard into as much of a nature preserve as we can by leaving lots of natural vegetation and installing bird feeders containing several different types of food. Frequent visitors last winter included a family of four mule deer until one of them showed up with a game leg and probably made a meal for one of the cougars that have been sighted in our neighborhood. Otherwise, we’ve had a family of skunks (Mom, Pop and four cute little kittens), foxes, an ermine, red squirrels, ground squirrels and, less happily, rats and mice.
Now that the weather is getting warmer and whatever pollen that feeds my allergies has begun to diminish, we’ve been spending more and more time out there. Our bird feeders are bringing in lots of common species like starlings, scrub jays, house finches, grosbeaks and chickadees. The hordes of goldfinches we had all winter are now dispersing elsewhere as natural forms of food become available, but we still get flickers, nuthatches and downy woodpeckers. We usually get an annual visit or two from a migrating oriole who stops by our hummingbird feeder, and last year a lazuli bunting crashed into a window and slowly recovered on our front deck.
Last Sunday, though, we had an even more exotic visitor. Marianna had just filled our birdbath and I was relaxing on the back deck when I looked up to see a beautiful western tanager taking a bath! Now western tanagers are anything but exotic, but we almost never see them in our yard, so that was an event! I called to Marianna, who grabbed her phone and took the photograph attached to this posting.
Unfortunately we can’t say, like our blogger-in-chief Mike O’Brien, who has a pandemic of roses and lilacs in his backyard, that we have a pandemic of western tanagers. But just one single infection is going to be enough to keep us going for quite a while.
*Gary Topping is a writer and historian living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the retired archivist for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City and has written many books and articles.
