Corpus Christi Caller Times Caller.com - 'Tis the season to use your imagination with virtual card

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Tuesday, December 14, 1999

'Tis the season to use your imagination with virtual card
If you look closely, you'll see a cuckoo feeding merrily and a snow goose perched handsomely

I do not send Christmas cards except for this virtual card addressed in Birdwatch to my friends and readers. On it I place a treasure trove of hoarded sights and sounds to remember and share.
   In honor of the millennium, the card this year is bordered with live fireworks. See them? The idea has been borrowed from the famous Harry Potter books where pictures can talk, and sparklers can spark and be sparkling.
   The tree in the middle is my old mulberry that had to be excised from my backyard. It is here for the second year and is laden with luscious blackberries and ripening red berries, and small, unripe green berries. It is hung with threads of webworms, and dangling tussock worms with heads at both ends. (This tree is not a people pleaser.) A yellow-billed cuckoo is feeding merrily on the worms. Twin mockingbirds are electrifying the air, scolding him with the harshest sounds they can muster.
   Two small bottles of blueish water are balanced in the branches. One contains water from the Arctic Sea and the other water from an Alaskan glacier. They were brought to me by my friend Marcella Jenkins to assure me I was thought about on a trip I was unable to make to Alaska.
   A handsome snow goose perched on a top branch symbolizes a species that thrived too well and wore out is environmental welcome.
   Instead of moss or snow under the tree, I have arranged a shallow marsh complete with small cattails. Two delightful birds are tucked into it. One of them is a bright, rust-colored least bittern, seen and photographed by a new friend, Yates Forbis. He and his wife, Ida, came with my old and dear friend Cynthia Donnelly to visit me at Port Aransas last spring. The other bird is the charmingly chatty little Virginia rail seen with Beverly held and Don Bentley, my teammates on the Probirding Tournament last month.
   Besides being 3-D, my cards are musical. Solos are sung by a pair of Carolina wrens that favored my neighborhood this year. A house wren contributes an obbligato. The chorus is made up of twenty tiny green tree frogs heard on a dark night in Cuernavaca.
   Curly firework ash worms, ignited with a Mexican wax match, a cerilla, unroll along the bottom of the card.
   The message on the inside is the same old song. I wish for you: joy in the beautiful things of the world, in trees, in books, in friends and family. I wish you health, and music, and love, and many birds.




Phyllis Yochem, a Corpus Christi resident, has studied birds of Texas since 1960.

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