EATING LIKE BIRDS
Full feeder in winter offers food for thought
Editor’s note: The best humor columnists take bits of their daily life and mine them for humor. In this “Slightly Kloss-Eyed” column, first published Feb. 6, 1985, Green Sheet humor columnist Gerald Kloss ruminates over his inability to get birds to partake during the winter at his carefully tended backyard bird feeder.
Whenever I look at the thermometer outside the kitchen window these cold winter days, I get a guilty feeling.
Where, where have I gone wrong?
Because when I look at the thermometer, I can’t help also looking at the bird feeder hanging from a low tree branch in the backyard, only 20 or so feet away. There it has been hanging, loaded with luscious grain pellets and bird seed, since early December or so. And hardly a bird has deigned to touch it.
The feeder is one of those long plastic tubes with four perches and holes — the holes framed with metal to keep chipmunks and squirrels from gnawing through the plastic, as they did on the old feeder. I cleaned it out late last fall and filled it to the top.
Since then, the level of seeds is down only a couple of inches from the top.
Now don’t tell me (as my wife has, often) that I’m using the wrong kind of bird seed. It’s the same brand that stores sell by the 50-pound bag through the winter. It’s the same brand that the birds eat greedily through the summer from the same feeder — so greedily that I sometimes have to refill it after a day.
Ah, you say, but a good many of those birds fly south for the winter, so naturally you’re not going to get as many at the feeder.
Good point, but why are the birds that do stick around here avoiding my feeder? At the office, I hear people boasting about how they’re going broke supplying bird seed for their thronging cardinals and juncos. All I can do is scuff my feet in embarrassed silence.
I know what you’ll suggest next: “Suet.” I’ve done that, too — not this winter, but the last one. I bought a couple of those balls of meat fat at the supermarket and hung them up in their red nylon netting near the feeder. Not once did I see a bird pecking away at them.
So what is it with the birds around our place? Don’t they realize it’s winter and they’re supposed to be starving? Every other day, it seems to me, I read some bit of advice in the paper about remembering to keep your bird feeder filled “because they depend on it.” Hah!
I know how they depend on it, all right. They depend on it to be there next summer, when there’s food in abundance everywhere. But instead of pecking away on the lawn or the flowers or the trees or whatever, they’ll freeload at my feeder because it’s easier. A lot of people, of course, don’t even fill their feeders in the summertime.
And that’s why I feel a little guilty about it all. Maybe I shouldn’t have spoiled them like that. Maybe their little bird brains have gotten the idea that this particular feeder is for summertime only and should be avoided in winter. It sounds crazy, but that’s the only explanation I have.
Unless … unless the birds realize that to refill the feeder I’d have to mush all the way around the back porch, through high drifts, and they want to spare me that chilly chore. What a charming thought — starving themselves like that just to make my life more comfortable? Why, you lovable twits, don’t you know I’d gladly refill that feeder every other day (or send a son outside to do it)?
Meanwhile, my only solace is a possible niche in the Guinness Book of World Records: “Gerald Kloss of the Town of Brookfield, Wis., had only two inches of bird seed eaten out of his tubular feeder through the entire winter of 1984-’85.”
I’d like to add, “They ignored the feeder out of love,” but I doubt the Guinness people would allow it. They’re so cynical.