N.I.M.B.F.

My bird feeder must be the worst bird feeder in the neighborhood. Local birds act like there’s a board of health sticker in the window. They treat it like a greasy corner pizza joint that they know is really just a mob front. 

I’ve tried everything: changing food … OK, I’ve tried changing food. I usually buy big bags of generic ShopRite or Home Depot “Birder’s Blend,” “Woodland Blend,” “Colorful East Coast Songbird Blend,” or “C’mon, Man: It’s Just a Bag of Fucking Seeds.” Neighborhood birds react to all of it as if I am offering free lollipops out of the back of a rusty Econoline. 

There’s a high-end garden enthusiast’s shop nearby with barrels of various homemade blends customized for all of your bird-watching proclivities and front-yard ecosystem requirements. Each barrel contains some combination of seeds, nuts, fruit pits, dead flies, Cocoa Pebbles, pixie turds and anything else a feathery friend might be enticed to feast upon. A pound of the typical blend costs as much as a pound of wagyu beef; it would be cheaper to try to attract sumo wrestlers. I traded three weeks of college tuition for a few pounds of the good stuff. It was like trying to serve bacon-wrapped scallops at a bar mitzvah. So I switched back to the store brands.

Don’t blame my yard. I’m not some dolt who turns his front lawn into a napalmed patch of Nexturf, then wonders where all the fireflies have gone. I don’t use pesticides, herbicides or even fertilizer. My lawn is 60% clover, 20% dandelions, 10% whatever grew in wild New Jersey meadows before we paved the state and 10% muddy divots I have been meaning to patch since 2013. I mow my lawn, often but not well, so there are patches of tall grass, wildflowers and weeds around every tree or pole. My wife and I maintain a squat little wooden bench laden with planters of flowers and herbs just a few feet from the planters. Gordon Ramsey might not be proud, but he would at least be tolerant. 

It all seems inviting enough. Squirrels love it. They hang around like pot dealers behind a 7-Eleven, waiting for me to turn my back so they can shoplift some Funyuns and drink straight from the Slurpee nozzle. But birds fly up to our little patch of paradise, perch atop a planter, poop a little one-star Yelp review onto my windshield, then fly to our next-door neighbor’s backyard feeders to enjoy three square meals, go on some coffee dates and possibly watch the World Cup.

Ah yes, my neighbor. He is a green-thumbed gardener. He grows herbs, hops, snap peas and strawberries so red and plump that they are pornographic in an immaculate little patch near the first tee of his Augusta National Golf Club lawn. I am looking at his garden out my window as I type this. Tall, colorful stalks of what I believe are lavender are waving mockingly at me in the late-spring breeze. 

My neighbor is also young and fit, with a matching spouse and a cherubic tot far too young to vanish with the car for hours or text bad news about a grad-school tuition increase. He’s a showoff, dammit, rubbing his vitality in my face while swanning about like Cyrus the Great in his backyard pairidaeza full of hummingbirds, toucans, condors, the endangered prismatic phantasmagoria finch, the Birdman of Fucking Alcatraz and (well) swans, with scarlet macaws swooping over my head to perch on his shoulders while I accidentally weed-whack poison ivy up my nostrils. Shame on him for putting a little effort and thought into his landscaping.

It wasn’t always like this. My feeders were popular among the cool birds back when they dangled from front-yard holly trees. Cardinals often stopped by: flashy dudes with frumpy wives tailing behind them, wishing they were back at the nest. Mourning doves fluttered in to serenade me with their 1980s British New Wave karaoke. The male cardinals often seemed more interested in the doves than the drab lady cardinals. Maybe it was their sad-girl emo vibe, or maybe it was a Sir Mix-a-Lot thing. Blue Jays also dropped by: wiseguys in their designer suits, always acting a little coked up; even my dog knew not to mess with them. In the feeder’s heyday, a robin, grackle or even an oriole might even visit for a quick nosh.

I can identify these specific birds because I downloaded the Merlin Bird ID app from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Open the app, turn on its microphone, and it listens to every ambient sound it can detect, though not in a creepy, privacy-invading way, I have chosen to hope.

The app lists each bird it detects: mourning dove, penitent dove, in-a-complicated-relationship dove, rock pigeon, R&B pigeon, mallard duck, Scrooge McDuck, house sparrow, garden sparrow, biker bar sparrow, traffic helicopter over the North-South freeway, and whatever Galapagos/Narnia fairytale beasts are cavorting among the hobbitberry shrubs next door. I know the app isn’t just making things up, because each listing is paired with a photo of the bird and samples of both each bird’s chirp and its various songs of hunger, danger or horniness.

Unfortunately, an overzealous tree removal service ripped up the holly trees a few years ago. I asked them to cut down the old dying one that was leaning ominously over my porch roof but to preserve the young, happy one. They misheard my orders amid the fog of war, or maybe the younger tree made a threatening gesture. It was a pile of woodchips before I could complain, and reassembling it would have been cost prohibitive. So I bought tall iron poles for the feeders. But even though there are other trees in the yard on which to perch, sing, woo, nest and launch scatological bombardier missions at my Civic, the cool birds moved out. 

That’s also when the house sparrows moved in.

There’s an unruly, overgrown shrub beside the steps to my elderly next-door neighbor’s front door. (She’s on the other side from the King of Kings, who as I type this is planting sapling cedars of Lebanon with the help of his albino peacock manservant.) From within the unkempt shrub sprouts an unintended laurel tree. Winding through the shrub and tree is something very mean-spirited and thorny; I mow my neighbor’s lawn for her, but I don’t tangle with anything that fights back. 

This bustling hedgerow has become a favela for house sparrows: tiny, drab creatures that look like a drawing of a bird by an uninspired and sad child. House sparrows are about as fun to watch as oversized gnats. They have colonized my feeders, giving them the ambience of a dank little taproom where shriveled men chain-smoke while complaining about the Phillies and their ex-wives. The bespoke hipster barrel-blend bird seed was lost on this clientele. Just give us some rotten corn and the contents of your ant traps. Put ‘em in a dirty glass. 

I spent many mornings watching these grungy little flying cowpies charmlessly hoover up my seed and worrying that I have become bird racist. Who am I to favor the red-breasted robin over the house sparrow? Aren’t they all God’s creatures? Aren’t blue jays assholes, anyway? Wasn’t that cardinal being cruel to his wife by blatantly flirting with those MDILFs? My yard is Little Sparrowtown now. Let them in, they love my seed. Dear heavens … I was turning into Sal from Do the Right Thing.

Then I learned that house sparrows are invasive. They’re aggressive little buggers who crowd out local species. The environmentally correct thing to do would be to take a flamethrower to my neighbor’s shrub and let St. Francis of Assisi sort ‘em out, though the Audubon Society minces words a bit on that last point for insurance liability purposes. My little birdfeeder bodega was actively harming the planet. 

But then I thought: maybe the environmentalists are the ones being racist. 

The house sparrow arrived from Europe in 1952, just a few years after the Potato Famine. They only reached my neighborhood a few years ago; the Irish, as well as the Italians and Polish, beat them by decades. And the sparrows can fly, for fuck’s sake. How invasive is that, really? 

The house sparrows are willing to live in a thorny tenement shrub and eat generic-brand seed while the “native” birds grouse that my showoff neighbor didn’t plant their preferred varieties of tarragon and dill. Especially the grouses.  They are noble little peckers. I will not be sucked in by Bird Weirdo Replacement Theory! House sparrows are welcome in my neighborhood! Though I should probably pay someone to rip out that shrub before it attracts wolverines or something. 

It turns out that maintaining a bird feeder can be surprisingly stressful, especially if you don’t put much effort into it. I should be sipping coffee on my front porch listening to chirps and warbles while enjoying nature’s primordial pageantry. Instead, I’m contemplating my insecurities, resentments and moral compromises while fiddling with a surveillance app and considering NIMBY policies for critters smaller than my fist who have never wronged me in any way. I am part of a shrinking bird middle class, trapped between a bird McMansion and the bird projects. I have gastropub ambitions but greasy-spoon talents. I consider myself a Man of the Bird People, but I can’t shake my bourgeois sensibilities and little patience for hobnobbing with the proletariat. I’m a limo-bird liberal, an ornitho-poser, an ineffectual featherless fraud.

Or maybe I am being a bit neurotic.

Spring mornings have been breezy lately, my work schedule entering its summer lull. There’s diversity at my feeders, for a change. The sparrows and squirrels are still about, but so is a robin, and the doves are singing “Pictures of You.” A walk around the neighborhood provides ample evidence of Canada geese. I don’t need the Merlin app to tell me that a woodpecker is remodeling nearby. It’s all very simple and tranquil, the local wildlife reminding us that always worrying about tomorrow only makes our private worlds a little smaller. 

I could sit and watch the birds flutter and peck all morning. But my dog is quietly judging me. He wants me to finish this essay, or at least toss him the crust of my peanut butter toast. So it’s off to my desk, with its view of Archduke Greenthumb’s lavish wildlife preserve. 

Is that a [checks app] Carolina chickadee? Motherfucker.

Maybe I should install a birdbath.

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