I have been looking out of our living room window and watching a Northern Gilded Flicker (colaptes-auratus) feeding under our Burning Bush. The flicker is a beautiful bird with extraordinary colors highlighting it’s buff colored body. However as beautiful as the flicker is, it is not a bird I particularly like. It is a member of the woodpecker family and as such it has the nasty habit of pecking holes into the eaves of houses and barns, etc. and is quite destructive. I often chase them away when I see them around the homestead.
The burning bush (eunymus-alata) is a succulent green in spring and summer, turning a vibrant “fiery” red in fall and is covered with tiny red seeds that sustain a variety of birds during the long winter season. It is during this transitional time between winter and spring when the ground is still bare but warming that this gilded flicker came to visit us. It has been sprinkling a little rain this morning and there are a few small puddles remaining. This stunning bird has spent the better part of an hour under this bush, beside a puddle, feeding on it’s favorite food source (small sugar ants) as they emerge from the warming earth. It would eat the ants for several minutes and then just turn it’s body to the left and take a long draught of water from the puddle. This action was repeated over and over as I watched. After slaking it’s hunger and thirst in this way, it has moved to a different puddle and has been exuberantly bathing itself for the last 20 minutes. I have very much been enjoying the show this morning!
Now all the delight I have experienced in watching this show is not just in admiration of the bird – but also a profound awe of our God as He supplies for the needs of this flicker and the seeming satisfaction and contentment of the created for the provision of it’s Creator. God is the Lord of all creation and He is as aware of this bird’s needs as He is my own. How can man properly regard a God so big? Our minds cannot conceive His greatness!
For, lo, the winter is past, the rain (snow) is over and gone; The flowers appear on the earth; The time of the singing of the birds is come. Song of Songs 2:11,12a
Behold the fouls of the air; for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into arns; yet your Heavenly Father feedeth them. Matthew 6:26a
Allen
