Yellow Bird

A friend asked me to re-tell her my story about the yellow signs because she wanted to touch upon that during a sermon she was giving this weekend. I’ve told the “you are not alone” story many times and wrote about it in fictional terms in my first novel In The Lila.

No small wonder then, today as I sat with my streetwise sage by the pond he built for me in our new home … We saw a yellow bird come to visit the sanctuary. There are couple things you should know to fully grasp the wonder (statistical significance) of the moment.

I’ve had a backyard water garden or pond of some sort or another for more than 15 years.
And I’ve been an avid back yard birder for longer and I know my fair feathered friends fairly well.

It was a small bird … I would have said definitively a gold Finch but in truth it seemed slightly bigger. Though perhaps not as big as an oriel. Regardless … Gold finches have never been pond curious. And in the year we’ve been here we haven’t seen a one.

There was also a little black headed Phoebe checking out the ripples on the spillway, from her perch atop a copper light fixture. And a bright orange dragonfly who was persistent in her attempts to shoo the birds away.

But this yellow bird kept trying to put his feet in the water. He would fly from the magnolia tree to the Olive tree to the new jujube tree still in it’s pot. It dared to dip down onto the wheelbarrow then onto the rocks that bordered the cascading spillway.

On one fly by the little bird did touch it’s beak into the water as if to scoop up a mosquito fish before darting away into the branches of an evergreen near by.

Gold finches don’t eat fish and neither do orioles. Could be it was just getting a taste of the water. Though another thought came to mine.

I turned to my husband and said … “Maybe it’s a parakeet.”
“Could be”, he answered in the slow southern drawl.

Truth is … That yellow bird, the first we have ever seen at our pond, not quite looking like any previous visitor to our home, behaving differently than most birds do … statistically significantly so 🙂

Sure, it could have been a parakeet …
but it was most certainly a Paraclete.