Squirrels and Bird Feeders

 Squirrels and Bird Feeders

"Obsession is beautiful. It’s what makes art." - Joss Whedon

In early March, I set up a stand for bird feeders. In front of a tall birch tree in my backyard, I placed four different bird feeders and two plates, one for a water bowl and the other for a platform feeder, on a pole almost double my height. While searching for birds’ names, I’ve learned that different types of bird feeders attract different birds: a platform feeder that has an open, flat tray entices juncos, towhees, mourning doves, and a hopper or house feeder that holds birdseed and dispenses it into a tray at the bottom attracts my favorite birds - cardinals and bluejays. Sparrows, swallows, titmice, and grosbeaks like the long tube feeder, while woodpeckers, chickadees, and jay flock to the suet feeder.

The bird feeder set I had ordered online included those different feeders. Among them, the suet feeder, a thick wire mesh with large holes, could not hold the bird food I bought. What is suet? I had to look for it again. Suet looks like an energy bar my kids used to eat. It is a high energy formulation of animal fat and other ingredients to attract insect-eating birds. And those birds are also good for cultivating crops as they eat bugs in the garden. It's easy to make suet at home: after melting peanut butter and shortening together in a medium heat, you just mix the bird seed, oatmeal, and cornmeal, and freeze it. Then, just put them in the feeder. I took out the ingredients I had at home and made suet by substituting shortening with olive oil and cornmeal with almond meal.

After installing the bird feeders, I came in and looked out of the window, feeling content. Soon, however, I noticed a squirrel climbed up the stand and ate the bird food. The next morning, as soon as I woke up, I looked out of the window. A squirrel was eating on the stand, moving back and forth between the long tube feeder and the house feeder. A red cardinal was watching the squirrel from the birch tree, and on the ground, other small birds were pecking food that the squirrel was dropping. 

I was determined to fix this. On the other side of the bird feeders in my backyard, I set up a short stand for squirrel feeders so that they might easily reach their food. ‘When the squirrels find their food, they won’t climb a bird feeder stand and struggle to eat bird food.’ I thought. My naïve thoughts proved to be wrong shortly. Since I filled up the squirrel feeders in the morning, the squirrel feeders got empty even before the morning passed, and a squirrel was wobbling on top of the bird feeder stand again.

After my first failure, I installed a small umbrella on top of a barrel attached to the middle of the bird feeder stand to prevent squirrels from climbing up the pole. Standing by a window, I watched with confidence that this would work. A squirrel came near the stand, watched it get blocked by the barrel, and ran up to the birch tree behind the stand. As spring had not yet come, the tall birch exposed its scrawny, bare branches, so I could clearly see how fast the squirrel climbed up to a branch near the bird feeder stand and jumped from the branch to the stand. Then the squirrel clung to the bird feeder again. 

The squirrels’ persistence made me curious about them. I searched and found a few humorous facts about them: squirrels pretend to bury food periodically, digging empty holes and covering them up with leaves to deceive other animals and protect their actual food caches. The funny part is that they do not always remember where they buried it after storing food in different locations throughout their ranges. Hence, squirrels play an important role in growing and maintaining forest tree populations, as unrecovered nuts and seeds give way to germinating trees. And they use their fluffy tails to balance when traveling throughout treetops and electrical lines. They can even fall from heights of up to 100 feet without injuring themselves, as their tails can also serve as a parachute.

I went out to the backyard again and moved the stand away from the birch tree. I thought they could no longer climb up the stand or jump from a tree. Looking out of the window, I saw a squirrel hanging from a bird feeder again! I kept watching how they got there. A squirrel jumped from the ground to settle on the barrel attached to the stand and climbed it up again. After struggling for a while to eat the bird food by hanging from the stand, the squirrel turned the bird feeder upside down and poured the food on the ground. Other squirrels and some birds were pecking at the food that fell to the ground.

How tenacious the squirrel is! The squirrel’s obsession is feeding others. Looking at the squirrel, I remember what I learned from the writers’ workshop I took last fall. The author and visiting professor, Cutter Wood, chose Sei Shonagon's "Hateful Things" for the first reading and said during his first class, "It's almost an obsession to describe what you don't like in so much detail." After reading its entire 42 paragraphs, which list 39 things she hates, he asked us to write about our obsession as the first practice during the workshop. Perhaps Cutter wanted to convey the message that obsession is necessary to become an artist. 

In my life, I've never hung on to anything before. I might have unconsciously engraved the Buddhist teaching that "obsession breeds anguish" in my mind, as my mom used to take me to a temple when I was a little child. I loved hiking to the temple in a mountain and listening to the monk’s words while eating wild vegetable bibimbap. Now the squirrel hanging upside down to eat bird food teaches me about obsession anew.