The Square Peg – Cause and Effect
©
S. Bradley Stoner
Yesterday
I left you with a promise to follow-up on the Round Robin tale. So here
goes. As I said, the neighborhood birds are eating well… so well that they are
getting fat. Anybody who says that animals only eat what they need is full of
it. And you know what it is. Birds,
for example, are little pigs. Sometimes aggressive little pigs.
We have a Red Winged Blackbird
that will commandeer an entire feeder, chasing off all comers, including
White-winged Doves that are more than twice his size. He doesn’t care. He’s a
bully. Nobody is allowed near that feeder until he’s stuffed. Curiously, he
even chased off a Golden Shafted Flicker, and that woodpecker is easily twice
his size with a beak strong enough to hammer holes in an oak tree. Believe me,
that’s no easy task. Turns out, however, Mr. Flicker is a scaredy-cat.
The only one that gets away with
sharing the feeder is one of the smallest birds we have… an Eastern
Black-capped Chickadee. I’m guessing it’s because he’s so small, he can sneak
in on the opposite side of the feeder without attracting the Red-wing’s
attention. He’ll grab a seed and be gone before the blackbird knows he’s even
there.
The blackbird has a fraidy-cat
side too, though. Let a human step into the yard and he’s gone faster than you
can say, “lollapalooza.” You might say people are his Achilles’ heel. Or maybe
he just doesn’t like us. Who knows? But I digress.
Anyway, on to cause and effect
number one. Normally, the neighborhood birds breed and raise a brood twice a
year. Once in first spring (that’s the normal one) and once in second spring
(that would be in late September. We do get winter in South-central Texas, but
it only lasts a couple of days. The rest is spring and summer. They tell me we
have fall here, but I’ll be damned if I’ve ever seen it. Back to the birds.
This year, with all the folks providing them with an abundance of good eats,
the horny little buggers have had two broods so far, and they seem to be
working on a third. This causes a population explosion, which, of course,
increases bird seed sales at the local Walmart.
If the birds weren’t so much fun
to watch, I could save a fortune. Okay, maybe not a fortune, but at least
enough to go buy that nice 10” compound miter saw Harbor Freight keeps enticing
me with lower and lower prices. I don’t know where I’d put it… the shop is
pretty darn full right now, but it would simplify a lot of little jobs. I
digress again… dammit. Maybe I have ADD… Ooooh! Squirrel!
Hey… don’t tell me I’m the only
one! I’ve seen what some of you out there post. Speaking of squirrels, we are
now attracting those… about four of them. I’m pretty sure they’ve taken out ads
in the squirrel network. Not only that, they’re losing their fear of me. Now
they just climb up on the fence or the pergola and stare at me when I try to
scare them off. On the other hand, they might just be too full to move.
This brings me to the second
cause and effect. I was sitting on the back porch enjoying a relatively cool
afternoon (I say relatively because the temperature was hovering around 90° F rather than the 100+° mark where it had been
for the past week). The birds were ignoring me as usual, happily nibbling away
at the column of sunflower seeds in the feeders. Dumb Dora (a White-winged dove
so named because her porch light burns only at about ten watts) waddled up to
get a drink. When I say waddled, I’m not joking or being disparaging (well,
maybe just a little). Dora is so fat her belly almost drags on the ground.
Anyway, she hops up on the small fountain
to my left and proceeds to leisurely drink her fill while I sit and watch. She’s
just about to head back to the feeder when there is a sudden flash of gray, the
air next to the fountain is filled with a puff of downy feathers, and Dora is GONE! I mean gone gone. Yep, number two…
cause: fat doves; effect: hungry hawks; result: dinner for one. Hey, hawks have to eat too.
Old Mr. Goshawk found fat pickin’s,
literally. At least he did that day. This event, however, seemed to have
shocked the dove population back into reality from the state of Nirvana to
which they had succumbed. They posted sentries in the tree tops and roofs of
nearby houses. I never hear a call of warning, but all of a sudden, whoosh! The
whole flock takes off at top speed. Sure enough, the hawk is hot on their
tails. The doves have developed a new tactic that seems to be working. While
they take off en masse, they scatter to the four winds as soon as they’ve
gained altitude. This confuses Mr. Goshawk… by the time he gets around to
fixing on a target, they’ve all pretty much disappeared.
I kind of feel sorry for the old
bird, though. He spends a ton of energy chasing doves grown fat on easy
pickings while he goes hungry. All the birds are gone for now, and I see a
furry reddish banner waving above the feeder. Maybe Mr. Hawk should consider
hunting squirrels.
