The Last Word On Nothing

One of the first things I did when my family moved to our house a few years ago was buy a decent bird feeder. I filled it with seed and hung it from an eave on the porch, and less than a minute later a couple of black-capped chickadees flitted over to investigate. Before long song sparrows joined them, and then dark-eyed juncos, house finches, spotted towhees, others. From the kitchen I watched happily as a little community assembled itself.

Not everyone in the household shared my enthusiasm. We live in Seattle and like most cities Seattle has an abundance of rats. The locals soon discovered the feeder. At first they came only at night as single spies, but when time went by and nothing killed them, they grew bold. One afternoon my wife saw a nice big fat rat casually sorting through the birds’ castoffs.

“A rat!” she yelled. She hates rats.

“But just one this time!” I protested.

She gaped. “You mean you’ve seen more than one?!”

So that was a problem. She had loftier objections, too. “You’re always going on and on about wildness!” she said. “How is feeding birds at all consistent with that?” The ones flocking to the feeder, she pointed out, had been doing just fine on their own before. Wouldn’t it be better to attend to our yard in such a way so they can forage for a steady diet of insects and plant seeds, rather than plucking stale peanuts and millet out of a silo? Worse, isn’t feeding birds and reveling in their antics simply reducing them to mere entertainments? Here I was, an ecologist who studied birds, trying to entice them to me “like you’re Snow White.”

That stung. As a rebuttal I suppose I could have trotted out history. I could have said something about how I was part of a grand tradition that dates back at least 3,500 years. (I looked it up!) I could have listed famous feeders of birds through the ages, like St. Francis of Assisi or Thoreau. Instead I pointed out areas of my wife’s life where her actions and moral philosophies were perhaps not in perfect alignment. Maybe not the best tactic.

In the end we agreed to disagree, and I moved the feeder out to a tree near the edge of the yard. The rats still had their subsidy, but at least they would be out of sight, if not quite out of mind.

I was glad for the compromise, especially when the pandemic started. Confined to our house in those early days, forbidden from visiting the mountains or even the parks, I stood at the window and watched wistfully as the chickadees and everything else continued on as if nothing was wrong. At least they could come and go as they pleased.

The feeder became unusually active in the fall. That was when flocks of pine siskins began to visit. Siskins are small finches with pointy bills. Their buffy breasts are heavily streaked and they have a splash of yellow on their wings and tail. While the plumage’s subtleties reward close inspection, where the species truly shines is as a collective. As they move from treetop to treetop, their flocks are what I imagine an electron cloud to be: something with a loose but discernible shape, where dozens of dots represent locations that are only theoretical and subject to perpetual internal shiftings, the individual birds’ sudden bounding movements pulling my eye this way and that, all of them accompanied by bright chirps and buzzes.

Siskins are not unusual around here, but that fall scads and scads of them moved south in a phenomenon called an irruption. This particular irruption, due to a skimpy crop of evergreen seeds in Canada, was one of the largest ever recorded. Driven by hunger, the siskins descended on my feeder.

People who keep feeders, I have heard, can be ambivalent about siskins. A flock might take up residence at a feeder and empty it within a day, obliging a person to fill it again and again, burning through bird seed. But I loved the siskins. I loved their busyness and constant motion. Ten or more would cling to the feeder’s various protrusions and stuff themselves with seed, obliging the befuddled chickadees to wait in nearby bushes for space to open up.

Then one day I looked out the window and saw a siskin perched all by itself on the deck railing, its eyes half-closed and its feathers puffed out. It didn’t fly off when I approached, even as its flockmates fled from me. I could have picked it up if I wanted to, held it in my hands like St. Francis. My heart sank. Animals as a rule are loathe to give any outward sign of illness for fear of advertising their weakness to predators. That this siskin was so listless—so “tame,” as they are sometimes said to be—meant death was imminent.

A few days later I learned why when state wildlife officials sent out a notice asking people to take down their feeders. Salmonellosis, a disease caused by salmonella bacteria, was sweeping through the siskins, with reports of fluffy, lethargic birds coming in from around the state. Salmonellosis is highly communicable, “transmitted through droppings and saliva when birds flock together in large numbers, such as at bird feeders,” the notice read. My spiritual balm during the pandemic had become a hub for disease—the pandemic in miniature.

I dutifully took the feeder down, scrubbed it with bleach, and stashed it away for the recommended two weeks. But after those two weeks had passed, the state officials said we should keep the feeders down for maybe another couple of weeks, just to be safe. Then a month. Actually one more month on top of that. Finally, they said, we might as well just keep the feeders down until early summer, when the siskins would return to the boreal forests to breed.

The tenor and progress of these requests had unpleasant echoes. All the more so when, during my walks around the neighborhood, I saw feeders that people had left up. Then my jaw tightened. Over the past 21 months or so, I have in general and with admittedly mixed success tried not to be too judgmental whenever I see someone flouting public health guidance. Here, too, my better angels tried to come up with some excuses. Maybe those people just didn’t know about salmonellosis. Maybe they didn’t get the same press releases I did. Maybe, maybe, maybe. But in my heart of hearts I simmered with righteous indignation. How could people be so selfish? How could they be so ignorant? Couldn’t these bird lovers care enough about the birds not to feed them?

Talk about your unpleasant echoes. But at last summer came and the siskins went. With the state’s blessing I filled the feeder, hung it from its tree and took a few steps back, and waited. After a minute or two a chickadee fluttered over, and then another. The two of them hopped from branch to branch, their gazes flicking between me and the feeder as they balanced the putative threat of the former against the supposed benefits of the latter. They were close enough for me to see the individual feathers on their faces, the black pupils in their otherwise brown eyes. Close enough almost to touch. Then they ducked to the feeder, one after the other, and each grabbed a seed. I watched them spirit off and tried to feel happy about it. Chickadees, I thought. Always so quick to forgive.

Photograph by the author