Birds

Every day I scatter seeds across the lawn for the birds. I imagine my landlord disapproving, but, perhaps not. This house seems largely forgotten, the greenhouse choked with weeds and the lawnmower abandoned under the lilacs.

I probably should have drawn the line at pigeons.

The pigeons didn’t arrive for a year, but now a handful of the ordinary city variety mingle with their bigger country cousins, the wood pigeons, whose plump slowness tantalizes the dog. Along with the magpies and jackdaws, they rule the yard. Whenever the bigger birds take a break or get their fill, the little ones come: Blue Tits, little English Robins, the punk rock spectacle of European Goldfinches at their special nyger seed. It took me weeks to identify the perfectly anonymized Dunnock that darts through the thorny hawthorn tree, where I hung the suet feeder to keep away the neighbor’s cat.

My favorite pigeon is a genetic anomaly: a stark white body and head with the usual grey pigeon wings.

The neighbor feeds the birds, too, but they run a tighter operation. There are no pigeons, or magpies, or jackdaws, next door. Their feeders are enclosed in tidy wire mesh cages. It is advertised as squirrel proofing, but I’ve never seen a squirrel here. The native red squirrel was replaced in many areas with the invasive American grey, but I haven’t seen either. The squirrel cages mean that a bigger bird can’t reach the seeds. The neighbors also have artificial trees in their garden, luridly green from my upstairs window. They prefer their nature tidied.

I love the magpies, in their little tuxedos, but perhaps the neighbor is right to be suspicious. They plucked my entire crop of onions right out of the ground, and then left them to dry in the sun. I would have been less annoyed if they had eaten them. Sometimes I find marbles that they drop in the yard. Maybe they are a repayment for my onions. The real mystery is where they find marbles; surely no child has owned them for a decade.

The original owners of this house left, along with their geodesic greenhouse and rotting lawnmower, a bird bath not quite in the middle of the yard. This house sits on what must be a triple lot; in satellite view we take up a quarter of the block. Surely there was a garden here, once, to justify the space. All that remains now are some very old fashioned shrubs and the roses, one every ten feet down the fence line. I waited anxiously for them to bloom in the summer. Every one was hideously neon pink, just like every bulb was a daffodil. Everything else, except the lawn, has gone to nettles, against which I wage a half-hearted and entirely futile battle. The exterior of this house is as illegible as its strange interior rooms, each of which required a debate before we could put in the furniture.

The bird bath is presided over by a cement Cupid, staring eyelessly into the void. After decades of water splashes, he leans at an unsteady angle. The magpies and jackdaws shit on his head while they wait for their turn in the water. I try to remember my Mary Poppins. Wasn’t feeding the birds somehow the gateway drug to flying a kite, and thus to subverting capitalism in favor of love? Birds aren’t much for metaphors, and feeding the birds isn’t subverting capitalism, unless throwing money into the sky counts as sticking it to the man. Birdseed is expensive.

Yesterday a hawk killed my favorite pigeon. I felt, briefly, like a murderer, luring that poor creature to its death. Then I read that hawks single out the odd pigeons in a flock with ruthless efficiency. Genetic freaks don’t last long in the bird world.

The magpies staged an angry intervention, but too late, leaving a mass of bloody feathers and an abandoned lifeless body on the lawn. For the rest of the evening they screamed, chasing away not only the hawk but also a mass of circling gulls. I like to think they were staging a memorial for their fallen comrade, but it’s a foolish sentimentality. Magpies are determined omnivores. In the morning, only a few feathers remained. I don’t know who removed the corpse; it’s probably better that way.

I refilled the bird feeders in the rain, and scattered another handful of seeds.