I am one of those rare birds: a birder with poor vision, which is kind of like being a one-legged person aspiring to run a marathon. Golden-crowned Kinglets have long been one of the birds I have tried in vain to see without giving in to the temptation of a suet block. I have spent uncounted hours listening to maddening zee-zees while scanning conifer trees, branch by branch, with a pair of binoculars.

A couple of days ago, I'm strolling through the yard with the binos. I hear rustling in the birch tree over our deck and a few seconds later, manage to focus on a Golden-crowned Kinglet. Hooray! Finally! (I already have Ruby-crowned.) Later that day, I get another good look at the kinglets in the birch. The next day, the kinglets are hopping around on the deck railing. When it rains, it pours. It helps that the birch has lost part of its leaves and the kinglets have been spending most of their time there instead of the conifers where they usually hang out. The long, warm October, followed by the arctic blast of the last week must have left a lot of freeze-died bugs on the birch.

I have a home-made bird bath. It's a plastic container, sunk into the ground next to the well-house. It's fitted out with a small fountain pump and a little bird bath heater. The past few days have been so cold, the bird bath heater is barely keeping up. Today, there was a layer of ice over the top except for where the water from the fountain was creating a hole. So, this afternoon I went out and poured a bucket of hot water into the bath. While I'm pouring, I hear excited kinglet zee-zee-zeets from the spruce tree above me. The next thing I know, two kinglets are hopping around my feet while I'm pouring the water into the bath. Geez. How could I have ever had trouble seeing these birds? I look for them for 15 years and now I practically have to kick the little cotton balls out of the way. After they had drunk their fill, they zipped around on the deck in plain view for a while, just to rub it in.

The close kinglet encounter got me to thinking. First, it's amazing that these tiny little birds can maintain their body heat through bitter cold, and second, their behavior around the water suggests they don't get sufficient water from their food. But if they need to drink water (at least during dry periods like the recent spell), how do they survive in mountains so cold that there can't be much liquid water? The water incident itself was a little perplexing. After all, there WAS still running water, although the kinglets would have had to perch on ice to get to it. Not only that, this afternoon, the temperature had soared to a sweltering 38 F and there was melted, standing water in a nearby, above-ground bird bath (the usual shallow concrete type). If the kinglets were attracted by the sound of water being poured from the bucket, then why weren't they equally excited by the sound of running water from the fountain? Could they somehow tell, from a distance, that the water in the bucket was warm? I've never heard of any bird being able to detect IR radiation, so that doesn't seem likely. Maybe the intense cold has addled their tiny brains. I think it has mine.