So-Slow Book Club, Week 4: Bully birds & human biases

What happens when our attempts to lure cute & cuddly critters attract a different breed?

Join us in reading The Comfort of Crows by Margaret Renkl in a low-pressure, year-long book club. This post is for paid subscribers; feel free to check out one of the free posts in this series and if you like what you see, upgrade your membership for the full experience.

Like countless other people, I began bird-watching—the kind that happens at the backyard feeder, anyway—in 2020. Stuck at home during our first pandemic spring, neighborhood wildlife became a much-needed source of entertainment and optimism. People built elaborate squirrel obstacle courses in their backyards, we all chuckled over chunky groundhogs stealing produce from gardens.

And suddenly, we all noticed birds.

I invested in a variety of bird feeders in 2020, including a transparent suction-cup window model and a platform-style feeder that I mounted on a deck railing just outside my bedroom window.

That spring, I spent hours gazing out my window, wholly entertained. But I learned that four-legged seed-eaters don’t particularly care if a product is marketed as a “bird” feeder. An array of squirrels, and even a few chipmunks, came regularly to the feeder.

I never begrudged the squirrels their share. They’re also part of my backyard habitat, I figured, and they need to eat, too. But sometimes I felt sorry for the little finches and chickadees hopping around to the side of the feeder, waiting their turn while a greedy squirrel (or a mean blue jay) got its fill.

The funny thing is, while I was getting all indignant on their behalf, the birds themselves didn’t seem put out by this arrangement. They seemed to accept their place in the pecking order—and even after the feeder was ravaged by the bigger animals, there were still plenty of tiny little seeds for their tiny little beaks.

But humans have a curious tendency to “rank” certain kinds of wildlife more valuable than others, don’t we? Either because we find a certain critter more cute and cuddly or useful, or simply because we “invited” one and not another, we definitely insert our own human preferences and biases into the natural order of things.