Summer has settled in, the air thick with insects and thickets heavy with fruit, but the birds at my feeder don’t seem to care. Nuthatches, titmice, and catbirds whir and whiz and land unceasingly, enacting an aerial pecking order I can’t pretend to understand. But I do know that the woodpeckers prefer to dine alone, and that the skittish black-capped chickadees find strength not in size but in numbers.

Vanessa Czarnecki