I’m checking out the freezing woods on a record cold day in the north Chicago burbs. It snowed several inches yesterday and now the cold has set in. Single digits. Below zero wind chill, whatever the hell that means. And it’s a black and white world. Why am I nosing around in it? Well, I said I’d try to find a daily sighting as often as I could and put the results on this blog. So I’m looking in the woods.

I say the world here is black and white because there’s snow everywhere and where there isn’t snow there are trees and bushes. These have bare branches that are so dark brown on this cloudy day that they might as well be black. Black and white. Actually, kind of nice looking, like an art photo.

But if there’s any bird life to report, I’m not seeing it. Then, as though on cue, there are four cardinals in a bush. They don’t fly away as I approach. They’re cold, and there are berries on the bush, freeze-dried berries, but better than nothing I guess. So these birds stay. Two males, two females. A double date. And the males are so wildly out of place from the standpoint of color, that I stop and stare.

I’ve seen a million cardinals. They’re nothing to write home about. Except, at this moment, in this place, they amaze me. I wonder, why are they red? What evolutionary quirk made them that way? The bright red beak, the red crest, the black cheeks just for fun, and everywhere else, red, pure fire-engine red.

The old joke I never quite understood when I was a kid went: what’s black and white and red all over, and the answer according the grown-ups was a newspaper. As a little guy I didn’t get the pun, the double meaning of red/read. How stupid. Both me and the joke. But it came to me again, there in the woods. What’s black and white and red all over, and I thought: this day, and the male cardinals.

Those were the only birds I saw. I know there must have been others but they were laying low and I wasn’t hanging in there long enough to get frost bitten. Still, the cardinals did the job. They made my daily sighting a colorful one. The only redder thing in the woods was my nose.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 10th, 2009 at 12:33 am and is filed under "Daily Sightings" A Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.