Artwork by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
I received a somewhat surprising gift for my birthday recently. My wife gave me a bird feeder fitted with a digital camera that streams images of our backyard friends directly onto our handheld devices. The pictures are brilliant, sharp, and completely engaging. It’s as if the birds are perching right next to you.
I’m not an avid birder, but after tending my mother’s feeders for a bit, I thought it might be interesting to put up a few of my own. And, being an organic gardener, I wanted to foster a more natural ecosystem for my garden, reasoning that sparrows—my most frequent and voracious visitors—would eat weed seeds, caterpillars, and maybe even mosquitoes in our little slice of Eden, mitigating the need for pesticides. I already encourage mantises, ladybugs, toads, and other critters to live in my garden, but the more the merrier. You can never have enough predatory friends.
And so, our yard has become a sanctuary and a cafeteria for juncos, robins, chickadees, finches, Northern Cardinals, downy woodpeckers, and the occasional Baltimore Oriole (usually just passing through). Some of the sparrows nest in a grove of arbor vita right next to the feeder, making themselves right at home. And, as the sparrows and wrens have flocked to the feeder, they’ve attracted other creatures. A Snowy Owl landed in our garden during the other day. It just landed, stayed just a little while, and then when on its way.
There can be up to three dozen birds at our feeders at any point. They will sometimes, for no reason I can see, suddenly scatter, but at other times the reason is obvious. Even to me. Last Thursday, as I was sitting drinking my coffee, the birds fled when a hawk swooped in near the feeders, obviously looking for prey. Needless to say, the little guys scattered.
I like to think that I’m helping to support a natural ecosystem, but the truth is that I’m probably tipping the scales precipitously toward my little feathered friends. They have a lot to eat and a relatively safe shelter, surely a lot better situation than they’d have in the unfettered wild. As a result, it seems as if they’re multiplying like rabbits.
Viewing them form a distance, the sparrows tend to blend into each other. They’re rather bland-looking and small—pretty ordinary-looking. It’s nearly impossible to distinguish individuals. Or at least it was that way until we installed the camera feeder. Now I can observe every detail of each bird’s appearance, what it is they like to eat, and when they feed. Sparrows will usually come individually, sometimes in pairs. Sometimes they’re flighty, taking off suddenly for no reason, performing breathtaking dives before catching the wind and careening into the foliage of the arbor vitae before dropping into a precision landing. They display split-second decision-making skills, landing, eating, hopping from perch to perch, and then quickly—sometimes inexplicably—taking off without warning. Their motions, whether eating, flying, or observing, are herky-jerky and stilted, only rarely as graceful as their larger cousins, the swans or geese or loons.
There is a pair of cardinals that feed first thing every morning—just at first light. Even in the pre-dawn, the male’s plumage is a vibrant red that seems to give off a light of its own. The female, a drabber tannish color, still sports reddish highlights along her flanks. She is beautiful. Both, like airborne pirates, sport black masks on their faces. They are leisurely with their meals—being larger birds, they can probably afford to be. I could go on: the cowbirds are pigs and bullies, the downy woodpecker is shy except when the suet is out, and on and on.
We feed the birds and help them through the winter, but even here, in my urban backyard, in the eye of my streaming digital camera, the grand face of Nature remains mostly hidden from us. I have no idea what these creatures go through during subzero weather or how they manage to stay one step ahead of the hawks and cats and owls who are constantly on the prowl for them. I have only the most basic idea of how a sparrow processes stimuli into stunningly quick reactions, or how one bird taking flight precipitates an impeccably choreographed takeoff of an entire flock.
The centuries—millennia—of evolution that have culminated into these organisms, these tiny one-ounce creatures, these bundles of nerve and instinct, is nothing short of remarkable. And this is only seeing a fraction of what it is that comprises these creatures’ existence. I look at my cardinals and have to wonder where it is they nest, why they always travel together, or why they eat their breakfast each day at seven o’clock sharp.
The streaming camera shows me detail I otherwise never would have seen—the intricate coloring of the sparrow’s back, the meticulous care with which the cardinal picks out its black sunflower seeds, or the bowing parabolic flight paths juncos take from the feeder to their perches in the arbor vitae. Yet I know very little about this creature’s inner life, as much as any of us know about the inner workings of the natural world in general. And we do know less than we think.
Only the most recent research has shown us that trees communicate with each other through fungal networks in their roots and that plants can warn each other of danger through the use of pheromones. While hunting mice in the gap between crusted snow and the ground—the subnivean zone—foxes will align their attack vectors along the magnetic pole. Bees communicate through dance, wolves mate for life, and salmon will swim hundreds of miles upstream to spawn and then die.
Why? The most solid scientific research and logic can give us only vague hints to the intricate networks of understanding and communication in the natural world. So far. Eventually, we’ll find out more. Research will go forward, and knowledge will accumulate. Humans will learn. But the question remains as to whether the human race, in its insatiable drive (instinct), to exploit and destroy the natural world, will learn too little too late.
Already vast swaths of the rain forest in South America have been destroyed. Scientists are still discovering previously unknown species—who knows how many how gone extinct without us ever knowing of their existence? (WWF) The rapid loss of species today is said to be one to ten thousand times the natural rate of extinction. Who knows what secrets the tiny birds in my backyard carry? Fossil evidence shows they are descended from dinosaurs. Perhaps the spirit of raptors lives on in the tiny hearts of these tiny, elegant creatures. Who knows what secrets they keep?