Photoessay # 18 - My husband's herd

This is a piece that I wrote for a creative writing class I took last summer. It's a little precious. But I knew that I wanted to include one of my husband's pictures of his birdies. Bird pictures are at least as hard to take as softball pictures. I like this shot because it shows movement.


It started small. My son built a bird feeder in a high school woodshop class. My husband bought some birdfood and hung it in a tree in our front yard. We immediately had business, LBJ (Little Brown Jobs) soon clustered around the bird feeder and picked through the birdseed. They squacked and fluttered. Quite a bit of bird seed dropped down onto the ground forming a decomposing “millet mountain” under the bird feeder. If the feeder was empty, the assembled birds would scold and harass my husband when he went outside until he got out the ladder and filled it back up. Sometimes he went to work early so he was up in the ladder in pre-dawn darkness satisfying his customers.

The squirrels took notice. We delighted in their extreme acrobatic moves to get onto the birdfeeder. Often they would take a running start off one branch, bank off another branch and do a jackknife onto the birdfeeder where they would empty the birdfood onto Millet Mountain for themselves and their buddies to clean up later. My husband would study their technique and constantly make adjustments. Soon the birdfeeder was suspended on a line strung between two trees. My husband trimmed away branches several times to limit squirrel access. A succession of squirrel covers appeared over the birdfeeder which was raised and lowered to make it harder for the squirrels.

None of this worked to keep the squirrels out of the birdfeeder. Each maneuver brought a temporary halt to squirrel operations as they collectively assessed the new configuration. Within an hour, the squirrels already had their new playbook in place. New acrobatics appeared often involving in-air direction shifts and exciting gravity-defying flips onto the side of the birdfeeder. All of this was acompanied by excited chattering and scolding by the squirrels followed by indignant squawking by the birds when their feeder was emptied. No matter what strategy my husband used (and he bought many products ‘proven to work’ at the local birdfood store), the squirrels had a successful counter-move.

My husband decided on a completely new tactic, instead of fighting the squirrels he would feed them. He bought a squirrel feeder (and bags of yummy squirrel food) at the birdfood store (he IS one of their best customers) and mounted it on an adjoining tree. It was a wooden box filled with squirrel food. The squirrels climbed up onto a little platform in front of the box, opened up a wooden lid on the top, helped themselves, the lid fell back down with a satisfying slap and the squirrel took off. It was an immediate success, almost always there was a squirrel at the feeder, one nearby on the tree trunk and several more in line. The wooden slapping of the squirrel feeder filled the neighborhood. Months later, neighbors inquired, “what was that funny clapping sound and why were there SO many squirrels around?”

My husband has since added a suet feeder designed to keep the large birds out so the small birds could get a treat. The regular suet wouldn’t do. The local birdfood store convinced my husband that his clientele would be disappointed if he didn’t provide them with the special ‘almond crunch’ flavor. He’s also added a small bird bath which hangs from another branch. He eagerly awaits bird bathers, splashers and drinkers.

My husband is a devoted family man and he believes his duties extended to meeting the demands and desires of his bird and squirrel herd that he supplies in our front yard.