Birds are vanishing from our skies, blasted headlines from the September 22, 2019, edition of the Sunday New York Times. Twenty-nine percent fewer North American birds than 50 years before, a loss of 2.9 billion. And not just bald eagles and California condors. Robins, blue jays, Baltimore orioles. Grassland birds, wetland birds. Over 500 species in decline. Birds are disappearing.
The usual culprits are to blame, the article explained. Habitat loss and pesticides. Unconstrained cats in search of prey and high-speed collisions with picture windows.
Later that morning, driving with my husband, I asked, “Did you see the article? The birds are vanishing?”
“Yes, I read that one.”
“That’s a lot of birds to go missing,” I said. “You would think we’d notice.”
I was embarrassed that we didn’t. We are outdoors people. We took field zoology courses in college and searched the skies for hawks on camping trips. We named our first dog Lazuli Lucifer, in honor of the bunting, although that’s a mouthful and we quickly shortened it to Luke.
“Yes,” he says. “That’s a bunch of birds.” A pause. “Come to think of it, you don’t see huge flocks like you used to.”
“Hmm. Maybe not.” I struggled to picture one-third fewer birds perched on telephone wires, but it’s hard to see something that’s not there.
We drove in silence for several minutes, retreating into our anxieties. The absent birds were a reverse image of the canary in the coal mine, the harbinger of danger to come, the silent spring hurtling toward us.
Then we were on to another topic not quite so overwhelming.
I didn’t think much about it after that. The subsequent months brought plenty more to worry about. But every so often I would gaze up at the empty sky and wonder if there should be birds.
***
Three years later, I bought a bird feeder and hung it on a tree visible from the sofa on our new screened porch, a pandemic renovation designed to make lonely hours at home more tolerable. One of my friends had two feeders sitting right outside her living room window and after spending a morning mesmerized by her backyard menagerie, I decided I needed one, too.
I’d hung bird feeders before, but they were the wooden platform variety that only made munching less strenuous for squirrels. It seemed pointless. But watching the birds cluster on Julia’s tube feeders, I knew it was worth another attempt. Off I went to Home Depot, where I purchased a simple plastic tube feeder along with a bag of premium seed. Once at home, I filled the tube, hung it on a tree branch, and went to sit on my porch.
The birds gathered immediately. I wondered where they’d been hiding. Generic backyard birds, brown-gray and indistinguishable, at least to my untrained eye. Within minutes, I was entranced, watching and wasting the rest of the afternoon.
The next morning, we left home to spend a week with our daughter. I refilled the feeder dutifully. Now that the birds had found us, I didn’t want them to leave.
When we returned, we found it shattered on the ground. It must have fallen with considerable force.
“A wicked storm,” I guessed.
“No, squirrels,” my husband said. “Looks like they were having too much fun.”
“But how? How can they hang onto a plastic tube?”
He shrugged his shoulders. What difference did it make?
I felt momentarily defeated. But one afternoon with the feeder had been addictive, like some evil opioid that hooks you after a single dose. I was determined to try again.
This time I went to a specialist at the tiny bird boutique nestled in a strip mall between antique stores and gourmet groceries and high-end kitchenware shops that seemed to change each time I drove by. But the bird boutique had been there for 40 years.
I related my story to the owner, who smiled like Yoda. He’d heard this tale before.
“Try this one,” he advised. It was a tube encased within a cage suspended on calibrated springs. Even the largest backyard birds perching on the tube’s cage can feed from its openings unfettered. But the weight of a squirrel pulls the cage down and closes off the apertures.
A genius devised this.
“It could have been a raccoon if the feeder came down so hard,” the owner mused as he rang up the purchase. “But raccoons are smart. They will try this once and they won’t come back. Squirrels aren’t that bright. They will keep trying and trying.”
He was right. The squirrels struggled to breach the feeder repeatedly, leaping from tree branches onto the tube and scattering panicky birds in a tizzy. But they couldn’t outmaneuver the clever contraption. They crawled upside down and circled sideways, but they never seized the loot. They instead became bottom feeders, gorging on the discarded casings that litter the ground, sharing the bounty with their chipmunk brethren.
***
I sit in the porch now and watch the birds cluster around the feeder, sometimes as many as eight at once, taking their turns because there are only four openings. Cardinals, blue jays, and finches. Thrashers, woodpeckers, and wrens. I am gradually able to tell them apart – not all brown birds are alike.
My dog Millie is with me on the porch, her front paws planted on the ledge beneath the screen, on high alert, fixated on the rodents. Every now and then, she begins to whimper and shake, and I let her out. She bounds headlong toward the squirrels, oblivious to anything in her way, and completely disrupts the ecosystem. Birds and rodents race away and Millie chases after them back and forth across the yard. She hasn’t caught anything yet. I guess she isn’t so bright either.
Over dinner one evening I remarked to my husband, “I never knew we had so many birds in our yard.”
“We never did. It’s the bird feeder. That’s what bird feeders do.”
“But they gathered so quickly. They had to have been close by.”
Another shrug.
I remember the article about the vanishing birds, and I’m tempted to believe it’s simply not true. Why should I trust a report from obscure scientists pouring over databases cobbled together from hundreds of sources, some of which can’t be trustworthy? I mean, who could possibly count all those birds?
I resist that temptation, knowing it’s just an illusion. It’s hard to believe the whole of the world isn’t simply the sum of all the little worlds that look exactly like your own. It’s hard to accept the bigger, more complex, incongruous picture, especially when you don’t want to. Especially when you can’t do much about it.
I choose a middle ground. I don’t deny the inconvenient truth but won’t let it taint the intoxicating moments, when the chickadees sing, the squirrels scuttle, and Millie waits to attack; when the warring nations, the warring politicians, the warring factions all fade away and I am left in peace with the vanishing birds.
Copyright © 2024 by Bonnie Miller. All rights reserved.
Bonnie Miller is a retired physician and medical educator who has lived in Tennessee with her husband since 1980, when they moved to Nashville to begin residency training at Vanderbilt. They have three adult children and three grandsons, all living on the East Coast. Since her retirement in 2023, she has pursued long-standing hobbies and interests, including writing, quilting, gardening, and hiking in the South Cumberland Plateau.
Tagged: Essays
