Illustration by Alex Siklos
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The bird feeder we bought for our wooded yard in south central Ontario was what you would call basic. The kind you fill from the top. Nothing more than a clear plexiglass tube with a perch attached to a tray that circles the bottom. We attached a thin cotton rope to the wire handle and hung it from a tree where I could see it from our living room window.
And voilà – there were birds.
Mostly chickadees. The others were brown. Maybe sparrows. I didn’t yet know the names, which meant getting a book. And binoculars. Soon people I knew as ordinary friends revealed themselves to be armchair birders, offering clues.
I learned there were finches – lots of goldfinches – which grew more yellow as summer approached. Nuthatches ate upside down. Cardinals arrived as pairs. Brown-headed cowbirds were deemed evil. I didn’t know they laid their eggs in other birds’ nests and left their young to be raised by strangers. It is best not to know or to commence moralizing. When they come to the feeder, they come to eat.
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I loved having a feeder.
So did the squirrels.
They climbed the tree, shimmied down the rope and drained the feeder – seed disappearing down their gullets and onto the ground below.
I was not amused.
We moved the feeder. This worked to deter the squirrels briefly. Then the feeder began emptying again, as if it had sprung a leak.
We caught them in the act – launching themselves from the back of our truck with jaw-dropping athleticism.
We thought we were smarter than squirrels. We moved the feeder again.
A hydro wire crossed our property. We reasoned no squirrel would tightrope walk a hundred feet with no net. My husband, Keith, tied a wrench to a rope and hoisted the feeder 25 feet above the ground.
It was arduous to refill. Honestly, not the best solution.
When we saw a squirrel calmly traversing the hydro wire toward the feeder, that was the final straw.
We invested in a pole feeder which we could move around the yard. Its central pole had a few curved hooks branching outward at different intervals to hang the feeders. Our assumptions were dead wrong that it would make a difference.
When squirrels moved in, my love for all nature moved out
Squirrels test a branch, pause, then commit – launching with a precision that looks like courage but is really calculation. You will rarely see a squirrel fall to its death. Apparently 10 to 15 storeys pose no difficulty. Twenty-five feet was a joke.
Squirrels are light, with relatively large surface area. When they spread their limbs and tail, they stabilize. Each jump is a quiet agreement between muscle and memory. They do not imagine the space between. They go where they know they can arrive.
It’s a mistake we make over and over – to think as if we’re one of them.
The quality of seed began to matter to me, too. Sunflower bits. Shelled peanuts. Cranberries. Costly – but appealing to my palate.
I bought a suet feeder. Extra-long. No-mess blends. Marketers know their audience and I fell prey.
The birds came as promised. Purple finches. A dark-eyed junco on the snow. My vocabulary grew. My delight multiplied. I bought a cellphone lens to capture proof of arrival: a red-breasted grosbeak!
More feeders followed. A squirrel slammer. A hummingbird feeder. Nectar recipes. Orange slices. Wasps.
There is always some disappointment.
Grackles arrived in hordes. The noisy birds took over and that feeder came down. I considered a hopper style that looks like a house whose roof hinges upward, making it easy to fill.
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The squirrels adapted and climbed the pole.
We tried a baffle shaped like a lampshade. It worked until a raccoon appeared, swinging like a woodland pole dancer.
The lampshade was replaced with an inverted tube baffle. Squirrels got trapped underneath while our dog Cookie sat patiently at the base. Waiting.
Cookie is a miniature schnauzer, bred to hunt rats. She once had a groundhog in her mouth. Too fat to do anything about it. The rabbits and squirrels are safe, they usually outrun Cookie.
But once we found the tip of a squirrel tail – a black tuft on the snow. Like a pom-pom. Cookie’s trophy. The next spring a squirrel appeared with a white tip on an otherwise black tail. I’m certain that’s the one that got away.
We began to see owls, too. A barred owl sat in the tree for a long time. Majestic.
The next day there were feathers and blood on the snow.
“No footprints,” Keith said. “Likely the owl.”
I felt bad.
One afternoon Keith called me to the window. “There’s a fox.”
By the time I looked, it was something I could not un-see. Keith banged a roasting pan to scare it and the fox ran off – with the squirrel.
For a short while, there was no activity at the feeder at all.
It gave me pause.
I realized: I am the feeder. I am seeding the killing field.
The birds came back almost immediately. Then squirrels. Then rabbits.
The suet cage needs more suet or the pileated woodpecker has nothing to eat.
I fill the feeder. And life returns.
Akiko Ode Currie lives in Oro-Medonte, Ont.