> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.rubyskitchentable.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Snowbirds
- URL: https://www.rubyskitchentable.com/snowbirds/
- Published: 2026-11-06T11:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-11-06T11:00:00.000Z
- Author: Ruby Hayes
- Tags: devotional

*"But ask the animals, and they will teach you; the birds of the air, and they will tell you." — Job 12:7-8*

The snowbirds came back this week.

They are small gray birds with white bellies, and when they lift off the porch rail the white shows at the edges of their tails like the hem of a slip. They work the ground under the feeder more than the feeder itself, picking up what the chickadees drop. My mother called them snowbirds and said they came ahead of the first snow the way a cousin drives on ahead of the family to say the rest are on the road.

Henry Beale saw them before I did. Henry was Earl's friend for thirty years, and he lives up the road, and on Wednesday he stopped at the fence on his way to town and called across the yard, "Snowbirds are back, Ruby." I was out in the yard in Earl's old boots with my hair pinned up any which way. He touched the brim of his cap and went on. I put a hand to my hair after his truck was already gone, which is a ridiculous thing to do after.

I went inside and got the field guide my son Dan sent me last month and looked them up anyway, because I wanted to see what the book called them. The book calls them dark-eyed juncos, which is a name only a committee could love. My mother's name is better, and I am keeping it.

While I had the book open I turned to the page where I have a pencil mark beside a little brown-and-yellow bird. He came to the feeder one morning in September, stayed three minutes, and has not been back. Earl would have known him at a glance. Earl knew every bird that ever landed on this property, and I lived beside that knowing for forty-five years and never thought to ask for it. The book has four birds that could be him. I have narrowed it to three, which is the kind of progress I am used to.

Job says to ask the birds and they will tell me. I have been asking. They are slow to answer, and they answer in a language I am still learning at seventy-seven. But the snowbirds came back when my mother said they would, and that is an answer of a kind.

*Lord, the snowbirds are here. Whatever they are telling me, help me hear it.*