Within an hour, my feeders were loaded with sunflower seeds and hanging from hooks attached by suction cups to one of my two west windows. (There’s an air conditioner in the other.) From these windows I have an unobstructed view of sky, rooftops and an inch of New Jersey. Birds, I reasoned, could easily spot my provender.
And so the waiting began. Nobody showed. Finally, after 10 days I called that famous bird organization for advice. “How high up are you?” the expert asked. “Nine stories.” “Too high,” he said. “You won’t attract anything.” I hung up, disheartened. I was really looking forward to this. It would be like having a parakeet again–a flock of them–without having to clean the cage. I stared at the feeders. Probably I should take them down. But then I thought, What the hell: maybe some wayward feathered thing will stumble this way before spring.
It didn’t take that long. A couple of days later a bird the size of a sparrow perched on a feeder, snatched a seed and took off. I’d never seen anything like it–the bird, not the seed. It was brown and white, with patches of red on its head, chest and back. I was exhilarated.
To my further elation, there it was, in full color, on page 158 of my “Eastern Birds” guide, as if my guest himself had posed for the photo. I’d been visited by a house finch. Male. The females don’t turn red. These gregarious birds, I read, were “descended from caged birds set free on Long Island in the 1940s.” And one of them had snacked at my window.
What’s more, he came back a few days later with his nondescript girlfriend. From then on they’d show up occasionally, anxiously checking things out, eating at the speed of light, then suddenly taking flight. I was in heaven. And then hostilities broke out.
I have no idea how finches communicate, but word spread that McGrossman’s was open for business every day at dawn. A repetitive menu, but tasty and fast. Iffy seating, though.
Apart from a couple of birds that acknowledged the munificence of my spread and dined civilly, the flock behaved like a mob of European soccer fans. They even elbowed the poor one-footed chap out of the way. You could lay out enough to feed Dubuque, and if just four birds showed up they’d still holler like banshees and go at it beak to beak.
How sad, I thought, when the smallest, the frailest, display the same rotten traits as the strongest. Nevertheless, this nasty revelation was worth the pleasure of watching a house finch manipulate a sunflower seed in its beak and–without hands or teeth–miraculously unshell it.
The birds were making me feel fulfilled. I’d become a big, nurturing mother bird who kept the feeders clean, dry, brimming, well secured to the window (this after I came home to find one had fallen, suction cup and all, onto the roof below). Maybe in time they’d learn to “play nice.”
Enter the big brown pigeons with spots, a.k.a. mourning doves. Two. Then nine. Then many more of them plopping their fat bodies onto the feeders, scaring off the finches, spilling the seed–which, ironically, doves can’t eat because their beaks are no match for them. Still, again and again they’d assault the feeders, pecking furiously, as if this time some delectable “dove bar” would emerge. The mourning dove is either the biggest blockhead in birddom or the most optimistic.
In any case, my duties expanded. From then on, whenever I spotted or heard these nudniks I had to stop what I was doing, dash to the window and slap the blinds to scare them off. Seconds later, of course, they’d be back and we’d go through it all over again.
Eventually, I realized I’d become a big, neurotic mother bird. Did I need that? What with global meltdown and what Roseanne will do after her series ends, I have enough to worry about. So if the finches didn’t shape up and the doves ship out soon, I’d take down those feeders. As it was, with all the seed going to waste I was working double shifts just to keep them filled.
One afternoon I was working at my computer when my eye was drawn to the window. A male finch was nestled inside a feeder. He was immobile. I got up and edged closer, thinking, Please, don’t let him be dead. Since he was in profile, I could see only one of his eyes, and it was closed. Then it opened halfway. And closed again. I saw that he was dozing. What a sight. Lazily, he’d pick up a seed, deshell it, eat the kernel, then nod off for a moment. The pauses between his actions lengthened until, finally, with an unopened seed in his beak, he went to sleep.
I timed him. He slept for seven minutes. Standing there motionless, watching him, I knew I’d never take down the feeders, no matter how many doves pestered the finches, no matter how many finches pestered each other. That a creature this small in a city this treacherous felt secure enough at my window to fall asleep–with food in his mouth–was enough to keep me going.
So I am the obsessive-bird-sentinel woman of the Upper West Side, continually sprinting over to the window to shout at the doves or sprinkle seed on the windowsill for the finches other finches are bullying. I leave the house only to lug back another eight-pound sack of sunflower seeds. I have no life. What can I say? No one ever told me parenting would be easy.
