Feeding the birds proves hope is the thing with feathers

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/01/2023 (1339 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Feed the birds. Many people do.

There are debates about whether we should do so year-round, or just help out when the weather is tougher, in winter and early spring. I don’t know where I land with this one, but I do know that feeding birds has inherent value, teaching us how to connect with other species, how to care, and how to be on the side of life-giving.

I am relatively new to bird feeding. In the first winter after my husband died, I learned that there was a special place for buying bird-related things. My friend told me about it. She is a naturalist with bird feeders and bespoke screens so that during migrations, birds don’t crash into her picture windows.

My friend is thoughtful. More than thoughtful. She does things to protect the planet. I am thoughtful sometimes, but I often move too quickly into defeat, an umbilical cord I am trying to cut.

This shift is part of my retraining as widow. More fragile than I had ever been in my adult life, I default to less useful strategies — breath held, hope for rescue. I need a better toolbox, one I have to build from scratch, one that rests more firmly on grief-bearing ground.

My friend, a cancer and joint-replacement survivor, shows me parts of her tool shed: bird feeders, bird houses, screens. Suet in specially designed metal frames for suet eaters.

Once my husband put a bird feeder in the backyard. We could see it through the kitchen window. The squirrels could see it from an adjacent woodpile.

My husband hated them, the squirrels. I cringe still at the word hate, wanting to use something softer that might reveal his better side, but he really hated them. This did not speak well of him from a live-and-let-live point of view, but he was not made within that philosophy. A second-generation Holocaust survivor, an immigrant child anxious and lost in a new country, he had constructed armour around his breast to ward off assault. He played hooky and hockey through school to toughen up. He did not quiet his mind; he steeled it against invasion.

Thus, for him, the squirrels had invaded. He bought coils and wire and explored his own ingenuity. The squirrels were momentarily deterred. They found alternative pathways. He found alternative forms of rebuff. Rebuff is too gentle. This was war. He intended to win.

In his last year of university, he was living in a house that was more ruin than house, mouse- and squirrel-infested. He set himself up with a pellet gun in the kitchen. Other members of the household set up traps. He had the pellet gun. He would have used a rifle if he could have laid his hands on one. In the night, when the mice came out to dance around the traps, he lay on the floor, pellet gun in hand…

Of course he could not win against squirrels, any more than he could have defeated the mice. If I argued that squirrels were you-know-who’s creatures (and I did not necessarily believe in you-know-who), he simply snarled.

He wanted to feed birds. That was his program of “natural” selection. Squirrels could fend for themselves and not on his dime.

Picking my way through a new widowhood, I pick as well the day I will go to the bird store. I wonder what my husband would think of a store devoted to the feeding of birds. He worshipped hardware stores, but would have thought an establishment dedicated to things with wings extravagant.

But I needed, for reasons both apparent and obscure, to feed birds and I needed a place with everything birds need. From a philosophical point of view, that might be called nature. From my widow perch in a Manitoba winter in a too-quiet house, I too wished to be a carer of winged ones.

I have always been someone who buys “more than.” It is in my nature. My husband found that bottom line difficult to absorb.

If I was asked to bring one dish to a dinner, I brought two. If a single present would have sufficed, I moved readily beyond suffice. If there was an “ask” at the front door, I had a cheque in hand, beyond what he thought reasonable, beyond his impulse to close the door with “Not interested.”

He would complain I was porous with too little common sense. Perhaps, he suggested, my sense of boundary and enough were precarious. But, I am in the bird store and I need to feed the birds… I am not Mary Poppins, but I am trying to be on the side of life.

Four bird feeders, one suet holder, two kinds of birdseed (one a designer brand), bird-house hangers, metal, green, adorable — satisfaction.

Yet, I worry: Will I do this right? Will the birds come? I always fear there is the most correct way to do things. My husband embraced most correct as his way. He was gifted in tasks that required hammer and nails, power tools, problem-solving.

I rarely approached a hammer and nail, and if I did, the outcome was curious at best. I never turned on a power tool. I did not light the barbeque. Who would?

He did, but it seemed so dangerous. A lawn mower? Never. I did not grow grass. I grew a perennial garden. You don’t have to turn on a device and cut it down.

I am so used to this remarkable husband always having been right with all things mechanical, I am afraid of doing wrong with bird houses. The salesperson, observing, shows me how to fill them. I worry I will forget by the time I get home. I worry more. Can I stand on a ladder? Hammer something into the porch roof, screw in a ceiling hook and…

Of course this has to do with things mechanical, but also with the beating of the heart. When the heart is broken, nothing comes easily. I did not have a fixer’s experience nor the tools that come in packages in fix-it stores. Tools for the broken heart. They are elusive; they take more time to acquire.

On the porch ladder, I discover I can hang the bird feeder. With a nail. Not a hook. And I find some hooks hidden on the outside frame of the porch itself. Miracles. I have been in the house for almost 20 years and there the hooks are, waiting.

Not the ones that I’d used to hang plants on the inside underneath the porch ceiling — those would be too low and the squirrels watching know that. But when they’re hanging from the outside rim, I can fill the bird houses. I can unscrew the lids, screw them back on. Triumph. Tender turning points.

I stand with this triumph. Turn. There is no one on the porch, peering out the bay window, to notice. I cannot pull my husband up from an easy chair or the love seat that is not a couch, though he insisted it was one. I cannot take him to the bay window and say, “See the birds, honest to you-know-who, the birds, they are coming to these little houses and isn’t that a miracle?”

It is a miracle. They perch themselves, headfirst and upside down, loving the green feeder particularly. The turquoise house proves useful only for show and the bigger, round and burnt red one useless, though cute in the wind when it is windy.

A pair of woodpeckers love the suet. They share. A crazed squirrel learning how fly reaches the cylindrical green one the salesperson told me would be most popular. I admire the ingenuity. The porch deck is littered with sunflower shells.

From my perch, I admire the mess. I look to the bay window, the screen door. Empty. My husband is not there to curse the squirrel or fuss about the mess, to tell me again that one bird house would have sufficed, the other two ridiculous. That I never know when enough is enough.

On the side of seeds and birdhouses in tough times, I find myself wanting to tell him he is right.

debbieschnitzer@mts.net