Feed the Birds!

A friend of mine recently mentioned in a group email that she had put out suet for the wild birds that frequent her backyard, even though she finds suet disgusting.

To this, another of my friends (a Harlem-reared transplant to Rockland County who, like myself, finds all the flora and fauna of country life a frequently enchanting, if sometimes bewildering, change from, "Ugh, a rat . . . Ugh, a water bug . . . Ugh, a rat with wings . . . Echh, there goes a             landlord . . ."  responded, "What's suet? I wanted to feed the birds in my back yard and figured I would just throw the food on the ground. I bought a bag of food for wild birds, have no idea if it's the right kind. Not a good idea? Let me know."

Now, this was something I did happen to know about because of my summers in the Adirondacks, and I responded to her query as follows:

If you throw the birdseed on the ground, the squirrels will grab it all, and they will frighten the birds off, too. Finding a squirrel-proof feeder is a challenge most of us who like to do the St. Francis of Assisi act have faced.  The first time you see what looks like a ratty grey boa hanging over your feeder, you think, "How cute! Gee, that squirrel is smart!" Then you inspect your feeder a couple of days later and you realize your expensive feeder looks like a teenager whose pack of condoms failed to come out of the vending machine has been whaling on it with a tire iron, and suddenly you don't think the squirrels are so cute and so smart anymore, you're thinking, "I wanna kill that greedy little m.f.!"  The idea is to somehow hang the feeder on a wire that is so thin and so long that that the squirrel can't climb down it, or leap onto it from a branch, or do any of those other annoying acrobatic tricks at which squirrels excel.  There are also feeders with things called "squirrel baffles" on them, but not all of them work.

Suet is rendered animal fat and it looks like Crisco.  The birds like it, for some reason.  The English make puddings out of it.  The birds and the English are weird.

This provoked a barrage of emails from the other ladies on our email list, all of us more or less in agreement that squirrels are a pain in the ass if you happen to like feeding birds, that nobody likes pigeons (that would be the above-mentioned "rats with wings"), and that the English are weird.

The subconscious being a strange and terrible place, all of this led to the moment after lunch when I was finally disentangling the lights from among the dessicated branches of the Christmas tree (snap! crackle! pop!) and found myself cheerily bellowing that song about the bag lady from Mary Poppins. I haven't thought of it since I was about six years old, but, to my horror, I find that when I sing it today I still make the same mistake I made when I was a tiny child and didn't know what an apostle was:

Feed the birds, tuppence a bag
Tuppence, tuppence, tuppence a bag
Feed the birds," that's what she cries
While overhead, her birds fill the skies

All around the cathedral the saints and opossums
Look down as she sells her wares
Although you can't see it, 
You know they are smiling
Each time someone shows that he cares...

Actually, if there's an opossum looking down upon me, I'd just as soon have it be a smiling one.