For the Birds

Birds are eating us out of house and feeder these days.

Frigid winds slice across frozen, snow-covered ground. Feather-weight bodies require enormous resources to rise and to remain aloft. My birds must survive this desperate winter to breed, to sing, to be happy come spring.

I love watching my birds fly between the fir trees and their feeder. Some linger a while, eating slowly, others stay only a few seconds. They have different eating patterns and habits, and they trade time at the trough in ways only they understand. The smaller finches and even the cardinals stand on the lip of the feeder; woodpeckers hang by their feet from it and poke their beaks over its edge; doves scour the ground for what’s been dropped.

Sometimes I regret ever starting my birds down this path with me. If I’d never begun feeding them they wouldn’t know. They wouldn’t keep swooping out of the trees, taking dead aim at my ancient, green plastic feeder. A feeder that has only survived these two decades (or more, I can’t remember) because squirrels cannot climb around the poop-covered, green plastic baffle that keeps them from chewing it into oblivion.

I bundle up, daily, to trek out to retrieve the empty feeder. I maintain a path cleared through the snow across our creaky deck (when will one of its old boards give way?). I lift the feeder down, carry it into the garage. I bend over what started out as a 35-pound bag of Oiled Black Sunflower Seeds. It loses weight as I scoop its dark contents into the feeder. One day it will be light enough to carry it to the feeder instead of my carrying the feeder to it. That’s one trip, not two, across my small estate. Always calculating the easiest way to do a job.

When I walk out to refill my feeder I sometimes look right and left into neighbors’ yards to pick up any sign that I am not alone in my feeding project. I see no such sign, which does not mean that they are not similarly involved with our feathered neighbors. I judge no one on this matter, and trust that somewhere on our street a human neighbor feeds the birds, and most likely deer and other wild things as well.

But I really do not mind if I am the only one. I take no particular credit for my act of kindness toward nature. It costs a little money to feed my birds, but the claim that they “are eating us out of house and feeder” is hype. To get your attention (“Is Dean at risk of losing his home in order to feed mere birds?” No, he is not.).

But they do deserve my paltry generosity, do they not? Their ancestors were here long before we humans invaded their woods.