We call it “Bird TV”. There is only one program but it is so packed with real-life drama, conflict, comedy, and pathos that you can’t look away. The chickadees play, the sparrows fight, the hummingbirds put on aerial displays, and the songbirds sing, while you watch. 

I wrote about my descent into avian addiction a little while ago. About waking up, from troubling dreams of the micro-farm paved with starlings, to the harsh financial reality of turning greenbacks into so-much bird shit. That was only the beginning. Avian addiction turns out to be much worse.

It’s contagious.

We were visiting Carl and Lupe the other night. Carl and I were in his shop talking about guy things. He told me he had a problem and beckoned me into the garage. I stood in the darkness and waited while he tried to find the light switch. I heard stumbling. And cursing. And glass breaking. Then there was light.

I thought our bee stuff came in a giant pile of boxes. A cardboard pyramid of shipping cartons sat in the middle of Carl’s garage like some in-process homage to antiquity; Cheops wrought in miniature, just needing a few finishing touches. The boxes were all labeled with company names and cute little pictures of birds. Beyond the bird boxes was a pallet with a three-by-three, cube-shaped bag of woven polyethylene sitting on it; “BLACK OIL SUNFLOWER SEED” and “500LBS/225KG” were stenciled on the sides.

The beginning was (probably) a few weeks earlier. Carl and Lupe had come over and I was showing her the suet feeder hanging on the patio. While we were standing there a small, gray bird landed on the feeder, not a foot away from us. The bird was a bushtit, which is described as “a very small, nondescript, gray bird often found in gregarious flocks”. The rest of the flock showed up. The suet feeder was suddenly crawling with these non-descript birds all achatter and aflutter and abeing gregarious. These diminutive dollops of feathers could have their picture used to illustrate the definition of “cute” in the dictionary. Then more arrived. With no room on the feeder they started landing on Lupe; on her head, her arms, and her hands. To them she was nothing more than a convenient rest stop while they waited for a spot to open up on the suet. To her they were absolute magic.

Back in the garage I felt a hand on my back. My friend pushed me out of the way as she hurried to see what we were doing. Lupe followed behind.

“Oooooh”

All hope was lost.

Lupe started opening boxes and she and my friend dove headfirst into an architectural review of something on the order of twenty different styles of bird feeders. There were house-shaped things – ranch, split-level, and New England salt-box styles. There were feeders that looked like Swiss chalets – right down to the gingerbread trim. A-frames that looked like they were plucked from the side of a ski trail and shrunk down to bird scale. There were clear spheres looking like the escape pod from a sci-fi movie.

Then, there was the townhouse.

“Look,” my friend said to me. “It’s the same one we saw in San Francisco.”

Yes, it was.

A few weeks back we took a long weekend and went down to California. While there we went to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. More specifically we went to the gift shop. In the shop there were all sorts of products that famous designers had attached their prestigious signatures to in their desperate grab for cash. Located in such a high-end shop the message was that these piles of ugly, unusable crap were somehow a form of art that you, the potential customer, just didn’t understand. There were pillows with spikes, kitchen utensils guaranteed to drip scalding water onto your hands, umbrellas made of window screen, jewelry made out of safety reflectors. That kind of stuff.

One table was dedicated to birds.

And on that table sat the townhouse. A cube rendered in white and clear Lexan glued to a tray that barely extended beyond the base of the cube. It was very highly designed, very stylish, very avant-garde, and completely impractical. The cube itself would hold about ten pounds of bird feed. The unprotected landing area would exclude all but the tiniest of birds and allow, through unintended capillary action, all ten pounds of seed to be soaked by the rain.

It was, just to be fair, exactly like the fishing lures I used to buy: brilliant hues, feathered-teasers, plastic streamers, rattling eyes, and shiny hooks all with just one purpose. To get the fisherman to buy the lure. Do you think the fish care? Not a chance. Fish will bite a lure made from a hook with a piece of plastic bag stuck on it. Anything more than that is targeted directly at the only prey that is attracted by fancy lures, namely me.

Well, and you.

It’s the same with birds. They live in bushes. They eat bugs. They drink from muddy puddles in the driveway. They happily do things that a dog wouldn’t. To a bird, a feeder styled to resemble a Frank Lloyd Wright house hanging from a branch, induces the bird to ask just one question: Is there seed in there? Everything else is not about the bird.

I, without thinking, twice made my feelings on the subject known. Once in San Francisco and again in Carl and Lupe’s garage. My reward, in both cases, was indignant dismissal. I got tag-teamed in the garage. I sulked.

Several days afterward the boxes started arriving. Luckily, there were only four or five as compared to the stack in Carl and Lupe’s garage. That was something to be grateful about. Oh, yeah. And the bird seed did not arrive in a package weighing in at a not-insignificant fraction of a ton.

So, being the kind, caring individual that I am, I put together the stand. Hung the purple-hued, cut-glass, jewel-shaped hummingbird feeder from it. I stuck the post-modernist spherical, two-place feeder on the kitchen window. (It promptly fell off because I didn’t lick the suction cup.) I hung up the A-frame suet feeder with the hammered bronze roof. I attached the bird-bath/toilet option and screwed on the wire-mesh, sunflower seed platform. I aligned everything to the local magnetic field and finally…

I filled up the townhouse with seed and hung it from the top-most bracket.

The post bent a full twenty degrees off vertical.

Thoroughly torqued off, but with a happy friend, I made my way out to the micro-meadow in a huff.

I had rented a roto-tiller to start getting the garden areas ready for spring. In one of those odd conditions of commerce, I could only rent the tiller for too short a time, or too long. So with about eighteen hours left to go on the rental I decided to do my own very stylistic, very highly designed, and completely vindictive work of “art” out in the meadow; art to be dedicated to the hummingbirds. I recklessly changed my plans for a naturalist meadow into broad artistic stripes of wildflowers meant to symbolize man’s unyielding strife against both nature and humanity and how the pent up rage we all carry with us blah, blah, blah, blah.

I just really didn’t want to go back inside right then.

This anti-ecosystem vandalism of the meadow turned into one of the truly stupid spiteful acts of my life. Not only was it work, but it was mechanical work with a machine that 1) weighed in at a not-insignificant fraction of a ton and 2) didn’t turn worth shit. Imagine a five-hour sumo wrestling match.

Off I tore. Chunks of sod flew willy-nilly. Arcuate linear features of topsoil appeared in the meadow and, when dark finally fell, my art was complete. Broad stripes of loam competed with the natural topology in a way that just spoke to the unheeded need we all blah, blah, blah, blah. My demons now completely exorcized, I felt much better about the highly styled bird accessories despite being covered in dirt and bruises from the tiller.

When I woke up the next day, the newly carved strips writhed as if alive. I figured it was my nightmare again but I usually don’t have the same dream twice. So I pinched myself and nothing changed. Sure enough, my tiller art had churned up enough bugs, grubs, worms and tasty vegetation to keep an army of starlings and robins going for a fortnight. And they did. The songbirds had latched onto the new feeders – literally. It’s pretty funny to watch the birds cling precariously to the dangerous ledge of the new townhouse and try to eat without falling off. The new A-frame suet feeder went double-decker with the plain old one. (Want to guess which one the birds flock to?) The hummingbirds basically ignore the crystalline gem and, to date, not a single bird has been sighted at the space-age orb stuck to the kitchen window.

I rest my case.

But it’s still great to sit and watch endless hours of Bird TV without a single rerun or commercial. The chickadees still play, the sparrows still fight, the hummingbirds still put on aerial displays, the songbirds still sing, and endless flocks of chittering bushtits still encrust the suet feeders on their daily visits.

It’s entrancing.

But it’s time to tune out BTV for a while. You see, we just found this store a few miles up the road in Poulsbo that is packed to the rafters with feeders, seed, posts, and houses. I’m going to pay them a visit. I think the hummingbirds might like a tiny condo.