By Jan Worth-Nelson
The day the orioles showed up in the backyard all other news, it seemed to me, was bad.
I really don’t have to list all the stuff that’s bringing us down, right? We all get hit with it every day. I’m declining this time to “write what you know.” NO, NO, NO.
Instead, I’m turning away from the phone, the TV, the laptop, the pill bottle, and my own repetitive catastrophizing, to look out the window.
Why?
Because, dear friends: THERE ARE BIRDS.
They do not seem to be Republican or Democrat. They do not seem to be Protestant or Catholic or Jewish or Muslim.
They don’t care anything about your position on the Fourteenth Amendment or whether you show up for the protests at the little triangle at Miller Road and Ballenger Highway. (I care, but that’s another story. Thank you sweet Unitarians.)
If you are an oriole, all you care about is grape jelly. That is oriole communion.
In all my years on Maxine Street, I’ve lured all kinds of fowl to my backyard – nuthatches, cardinals, mourning doves, chickadees, finches (red and gold), blue jays, robins, woodpeckers, rose-breasted grosbeaks, tufted titmice – but never orioles.
My friends Teddy and Dennis, on the other hand, get orioles by the dozen every year. I’ve sat on their Mott Park porch many, many times sipping Dennis’s dangerously generous margaritas and repeatedly breaking the Tenth Commandment – that one about coveting.
I covet Teddy and Dennis’s orioles, and the more margaritas I drink the more elaborately melancholy I get that they don’t come to my house.
So, the first week of May, as Dennis suggested, I tried again.
I loaded up a Home Depot oriole feeder with the requisite grape jelly. I also poked orange halves onto the provided skewer. (Orioles like fresh fruit, too.) It was a day something particularly awful had happened in the world. I honestly can’t even keep track of what. So I figured, if there’s a day I need those flashes of feathery orange, this is it.
On my feeder-supply run I learned I’m not the only one who loves orioles.
If you go to the Meijer jelly section, you can see evidence: empty or nearly empty shelves where grape jelly should be. (Not the same for strawberry or orange marmalade.) Perhaps we were all buying grape jelly that day, obsessively hoping for a glimpse of bird beauty.
Here’s the initial news: On the first day, within a half hour after I hung my feeder, it happened! First a yellowish female, and then the gorgeous male himself. I caught it from the kitchen window.
“ORIOLES!” I hollered. “They’re here!”
My exuberant shout woke up Ted, who had been hypnotized by bad news in the other room.
“YAY!” Ted yelled back.
Dopamine flooded me. It was almost as wonderful as seeing the solar eclipse: unambivalently joyful! I texted Dennis and Teddy: “I got them!” I said. I didn’t get a photo on my iPhone before they flew off, being notoriously quick and shy.
And here’s the follow-up news: They fluttered around for a few minutes, maybe an hour or two and then… nothing. That May afternoon was the only time I ever saw them in my backyard.
Orioles in Mott Park. (Photo by Dennis Brown)
I’ve kept loading up the glass cups with jelly all summer, skewering orange halves. The jelly is gobbled up by red finches, who I’m told often are responsible for chasing off other birds. Cardinals and the occasional woodpeckers munch on the oranges. Those are some pretty sweet birds too, after all.
So, I had my oriole moment. I’m sad they haven’t stayed around, but that’s life, isn’t it? You take your kicks where you can get them, and I had one oriole day. If I want to gorge on seeing them, I just go to Mott Park and demand a drink on Teddy and Dennis’s porch.
This article also appears in East Village Magazine’s June/July 2025 Issue.
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