For the Birds

Newsletter 2025-01-20

What do you give as a Christmas gift for the people who have everything? If you’re my parents, all they want is self-improvement. Well, other-improvement. They would really like for me to be a better person. That’s not going to happen. For our extremely belated Christmas, I turned to blatant consumerism instead. I bought them a joint present that will either be the best or worst thing they receive this season. Because of the odd timing of our much-delayed holiday weekend, I won’t have time to write this newsletter after they actually open the gift. That’s ideal. I want to tell this story when there’s still a chance one or both of them won’t be overwhelmed by rage and disappointment. I might yet avoid the bad ending. I aspire for the medium ending where they just kind of shrug and have no strong feelings one way or the other. That’s way better than getting disowned again.

My dad is the simpler of my parents to buy for. His interests are Bigfoot and birds. If it doesn’t start with b, he wants nothing to do with it. He’s also into beer and black coffee, but to a lesser degree. We’ve already given him far more caffeinated and adult beverages that he can consume in a lifetime. It doesn’t help that he displays a level of moderation he failed to pass on to his sons. He’ll have one or two beers this weekend. The rest of us will have slightly more. There won’t be any way to know who finished off those twin thirty packs. It was probably the dog.

Bigfoot gifts are held back by the elusiveness of their subject matter. There hasn’t been breaking news on the cryptid front in a while. That’s led to a lack of new merchandise. We’ve gotten my dad every Bigfoot hunting kit, novelty mug, and Christmas ornament on the market. I wish they’d find the guy already so there’d be new stuff to buy. My dad would kill for a signed Bigfoot autograph. Short of that, the Bigfoot angle is exhausted. That just leaves birds.

Those flying dinosaurs have long been my nemeses. If Jurassic Park had been made with geese instead of raptors, it would have been even scarier. Too scary, in fact. Steven Spielberg passed on using them because he didn’t want his movie to be rated R. Recently, I’ve warmed up to birds, or at least regarded them with a reduced level of hate. It’s all thanks to a little board game called Wingspan. The birds on those cards are adorable. More importantly, they’re worth points. If I can gamify something and use it to triumph over my frenemies, it’s immediately more appealing. It might just trick me into liking birds yet. My dad doesn’t play board games, but he does like to look out the window. We’ve bought him a lot of bird feeders over the years. He might not have any tree branches or fence posts left to hang new ones. I’m surprised that his neighbors haven’t complained that he’s hoarding all the local birds. There aren’t enough of them to go around. That’s not my dad’s fault. If other people on the street want some feathered friends, they, too, should be impossible to buy for at Christmas.

My mom is a more difficult riddle to solve. Outside of chocolate covered cherries, I can’t figure out what she wants. That’s the downside of leading a rich and fulfilling life. If only she were dependent on blatant consumerism like the rest of us. She likes her pets, and she enjoys catching wildlife on the security cameras in the backyard. Her postage stamp-sized green space could host a nature documentary. The actual grass area is probably twenty feet by twenty feet, but it’s broken up by a deck, swing set, and sidewalk. There’s more space in the front yard, but wild animals never go there. It has a four foot tall picket fence plus a line of privets, making it not worth the trouble to reach the dog poop it so jealously guards. The backyard is a different story. The fence is much lower on one side, and it defends not just dog droppings, but also an apple tree. More than once, the security cameras have captured deer in the early hours of the morning standing in that tiny yard munching small fruit. I have no idea where these animals hide during the day. My parents are in a very urban area in the middle of the city. Yet night after night, the deer show up, sometimes stopping to graze and other times just wandering up and down the alley behind the house to case the joint. My mom loves catching them on video. It’s animal voyeurism at its worst.

My idea for a joint gift for both my mom and dad is a video bird feeder. It was originally just going to be for my dad, but nice video bird feeders are really expensive, so now I have to justify it for both parents. Hopefully my mom doesn’t read that part. There’s a chance they’ll both enjoy it. All of my siblings will also likely be getting my dad bird feeders, but hopefully of the lesser, non-video variety. Not everybody can be the best child in the family. My status in that group depends entirely on the premise that our parents’ love can be bought. When a bird lands on the perch of the video feeder, a camera automatically starts filming in 1080p. It then sends an alert to your phone to show you the bird and also identifies it using AI. More importantly, you can share that video with other people by sending a link. That’s the part I think will appeal to my mom. She loves filling the family Facebook Messenger thread with deer sightings. I’m betting she’ll get just as excited about birds if she has good, clear videos of them. If not, next Christmas I’ll buy her a really expensive gift and then make up reasons why it should be for both her and my dad. Maybe I can stack a giant mound of chocolate covered cherries in the shape of Bigfoot.

The video bird feeder solves the worst problem with bird watching, other than the birds themselves. That downside will stick around, unfortunately. The other main drawback of bird watching is that the birds are so far away. They’re skittish by nature, which is how they survive. The birds that aren’t afraid of us are the ones you don’t want around. I’m looking at you, pigeons and seagulls. Actually, I’m not looking. I’m doing my best to ignore you. There’s nothing worse than flying vermin in search of trash. They won’t hesitate to get all up in your business. By contrast, even Canada geese keep a medium distance—unless I’m driving by that retention pond on the way to the gym. Then the geese take up the entire road and dare me to drive through them. I respectfully wait until they move. Fifty angry geese can defeat a minivan any day. I should have Lola bring the second van behind me to make it a fair fight.

Photo by Afra Ramió on Unsplash

The birds you actually want to see always fly away. The video bird feeder gets around that. It sticks the camera right in their faces, and they don’t even know it. That means they’ll be completely unaware when it captures them in embarrassing poses with their beaks open and food hanging out. The hardest part of observing wildlife is the cringe factor. We’ll get to see birds up close and personal, flaws and all. Perhaps the reason they dart away at the first sign of humans isn’t because they’re afraid of being eaten, but because they know they look best from a distance. Nobody has invented bird makeup yet. I can’t wait to see all those acne scars and crow’s feet.

Recording the birds should help my parents finally see the rare, cool ones. My mom and dad both still work. They can’t spend all day looking out the back window to see what flies or walks in. My mom has yet to see a deer in real time. They always show up when she’s in bed. It doesn’t help that she goes to sleep at 9 p.m. and wakes up at 3 a.m.. She’d even miss most diurnal animals with those numbers. If there are any night birds out there in search of a midnight snack, they’ll be caught in the act. Hopefully my parents know how to turn off notifications on their phones overnight. I don’t want them to wake up when the same sparrow with insomnia comes back for the third time. Then again, most flying animals don’t feed in the dark. It would probably just be bats and owls. Unless my dad fills the feeder with mosquitoes or mice, the feeder should remain untouched in the dark. That’s assuming the mammals stay away. Maybe those deer will be extra aggressive and check out the bird feeder now that there are no more apples on the trees. With how bold they’ve been on the rest of the property, it’s only a matter of time until one of them lets itself into the house to make a sandwich.

My parents don’t have space for another bird feeder, but for one this fancy, they’ll have to make room. Maybe they can throw away one of the bird feeders I gave them for a previous Christmas. We live in a disposable society for a reason. I assume the new video bird feeder will be so superior to everything else out there that they could toss out all the bird feeders from my siblings as well. Unless my mom truly hates the gift and feels snubbed, in which case the new bird feeder will only film the inside of a garage closet. That could be okay, too. I’ve always wondered about the inner life of mice and closet ghosts.

One limitation on the video bird feeder is nature itself. I’m not sure if my parents’ neighborhood actually has that many interesting birds. There are plenty of sparrows to be sure, plus the occasional robin and grackle. That’s about it. If we were playing Wingspan, I would describe all of those as garbage birds. They’re not worth very many points, and they’re not very special. Yes, I can make superficial judgements like that based solely on appearance. If you’re mostly bland colors and everywhere on my block, I want nothing to do with you. My parents live a few miles from the lake, which features more impressive birds, but it would be challenging to get them to stop by. If my dad has a few extra cans of sardines lying around, maybe he can attract a great blue heron. Seeing that thing staring into the bird feeder would be a truly startling experience. I’d rather not turn this avian Snapchat into a horror movie. The only thing that could be scarier would be if Big Bird showed up. I don’t know what species he’s supposed to be, but whatever he is, I hope he sticks to Sesame Street. This bird feeder is made for free samples, not three-course meals. My parents’ birdseed budget doesn’t cover an all-you-can-eat buffet for the largest Muppet in the world.

There are other animals in the vicinity that might take an interest in the feeder. The regular security cameras have captured raccoons skulking about. They’re never up to any good. Their skulls are shaped exactly like those of bears, but smaller. They can also get into anything. I suspect they lurk around my parents’ house for revenge. When he was in high school in farm country, my dad made money by running through the woods shooting raccoons, whose pelts were worth fifty dollars each. He earned enough money to buy another gun to kill even more raccoons. It was capitalism in action. Based on the security camera footage, the raccoons remember. My parents better lock their doors. It couldn’t hurt to also dig a moat.

The most dangerous animals, however, are humans. My parents’ security cameras have picked up police officers more than once who were looking for somebody on the run in the neighborhood. The video bird feeder is unlikely to capture such exciting footage. Perhaps it won’t appeal to my mom if it can’t can’t pump out an impromptu episode of Cops. I’m banking on the chance that she might welcome a change of pace. The tranquil snippets of birds eating might be a nice break from the chaos transpiring on the rest of the property. On the other hand, this could be the reason she uninvites me from Christmas next year. Only time will tell.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James