“Three years ago at dusk on a spring evening, when the sky was a robin’s-egg blue and the wind as soft as a day-old chick, I was sitting on the verandah of my farm home in eastern Iowa when a voice very clearly said to me, “If you build it, he will come.”
The voice was that of a ballpark announcer. As he spoke, I instantly envisioned the finished product I knew I was being asked to conceive. I could see the dark, squarish speakers, like ancient sailors’ hats, attached to aluminum-painted light standards that glowed down into a baseball field, my present position being directly behind home plate.”
W. P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe
The willow goldfinch is hereby designated as the official bird of the state of Washington.
Revised Code of Washington, Section 1.20.040
During a visit to our local supermarket several weeks ago, we happened down the aisle which includes wild bird seed. We have one older bird feeder we haven’t used for a while, since our former cats (now deceased) used to park themselves under it in hope of a free meal. They were more successful at realizing their fantasy than we liked, so we discontinued using the feeder and I was contemplating reviving it since we no longer have the pleasure of the cats’ company.
While inspecting various seeds on offer, I noticed a thistle feeder set off to one side and, on impulse, bought it. I have long enjoyed the goldfinches nesting on our property, often encountering them in the early morning lined up along the top of the chain link fence bordering our pasture, only to watch them startle at my presence and fly away to nearby, higher pine boughs in erratic, episodic flight patterns. Goldfinches love thistle seed, so I grabbed the box, read its back hastily, and put the feeder in our shopping cart – only to discover upon our arrival home that it didn’t come equipped with seed. So a second trip to the store was necessitated, one that took two days to accomplish, one that fed my impatience to begin up close goldfinch watching in earnest.
I had already assembled the feeder in anticipation of getting the seed and located a vacant cup hook outside our living room window on which to hang it when we arrived home with the seed. I immediately filled the feeder, hung it, and returned to my seat on the living room couch to see whether the feeder’s placement was successful from the standpoint of viewing parameters. It was, and so I sat down and waited. And waited. And waited.
Nothing happened that first day, nor did anything occur on the second. The feeder had begun to look lonely swaying back and forth in the light breezes of late July and I, impatient as always, began to believe the idea had been a waste of faith. All bird feeders, after all, owe their existence to the notion so clearly expressed by W. P. Kinsella in Shoeless Joe as quoted above, a line that became famous courtesy of the motion picture based on the book, Field of Dreams.
On the afternoon of the third day as I was engaged in my favorite post-retirement afternoon activity – reading a good book while nodding off; a very possible activity which you shouldn’t scoff at without first attempting – Helen sat down across from me and said there was a goldfinch on the feeder. I looked around quickly, thinking a feeding bird a true rarity given the previous two days lack, and there was a female goldfinch happily taking seeds from the feeder’s clear plastic tube. The scant movement I made to twist my head in the feeder’s direction was enough to cause her to fly away, so I only caught a momentary glimpse. The feeder resumed its idle swaying, still full to the brim with seed, the single female not having noticeably reduced its content.
The remainder of that day passed without another visitor, or at least no other visitors that we caught in flagrante. But on the morning of the next day it seemed to me that the level of seed had declined somewhat. Things such as the relative level of seed in a thistle feeder are always suspect, for I never remember to mark where the level began and am reduced to wondering if the current level is really anything other than it was when first filled. I finally convinced myself that in my eagerness to watch goldfinches up close I had imagined a reduction in level, since the difference, if any, was too miniscule to measure.
The next morning – the morning of the fourth day – the level of seed was appreciably lower and I began to imagine one very fat female goldfinch weighing down the end of a pine bough somewhere along the line of pines that follows the driveway from the communal lane to our house. I began to imagine that she was Super Finch, an 800 ounce female finch dominatrix bossing around all the little male goldfinches in the area. I never took this notion to the point of actually looking for her, but it tickled my fancy and so I tucked it carefully away in my imagination. Surely, if Ray Kinsella, the hero of Shoeless Joe, can have conversations with Shoeless Joe Jackson in an Iowa cornfield years after Shoeless Joe’s death, I am entitled to contemplate the existence of a bossy female finch-gorilla directing all the goldfinch traffic on our farm.
Alas, I was wrong, but the reality was so much better than my fantasy. That same afternoon Helen once again sat down opposite me and said: “Have you noticed all the goldfinches on the feeder?” I emerged from deep within my book – I have a habit of getting lost in whatever world an author has created – to find that every perch on the feeder was occupied by male and female goldfinches. As I watched in wonder, I could see other goldfinches alighting on our roof, looking down impatiently on those feeding beneath them, anxious for their turn at the trough. And not all of the interest was being shown by goldfinches, for there were a few foreigners in evidence.
And so began what has turned into weeks of enjoyment, watching birds come and go, watching them stretch out their necks to assess the threat level at any given moment, watching non-feeding birds fly at feeding birds in hopes of an abandoned perch on which the flyer might dine. We not only have gotten to see the beauty of their plumage close up, we have begun to recognize patterns of behavior, to recognize the more aggressive birds and the shyer ones.
We have also noted the downsides of having a feeder hanging over our deck – the pile of seed husks and uneaten seeds which must be vacuumed up with regularity, the scat of something bigger, something mammalian, which is obviously making a meal from the deck’s seed pile in the night, the cost of the seed which we are now constantly buying to replenish the feeder each day. These downsides were somewhat diminished by my discovery of a dead snail buried under a weight of seed and seed husks the first time I vacuumed the pile from the deck. I may well write a future blog piece on the satisfactions of snail euthanasia by dint of bird seed. After all, if I’m not to be allowed 800 ounce female finch dominatrices, I can at least satisfy my flights of fancy by being heralded as the discoverer of a new, organic method of dispatching hated garden pests.
Goldfinches know a good thing when they see it, and we have discovered from books and from personal viewing that they feed in flocks. A single refill of the feeder now lasts little more than one day, and when the seed level gets too low the feeders upper perches no longer yields seed to questing beaks and the fighting among the diners for a lower perch only increases. So each morning before I shower and dress for the day, I dutifully take a bag of seed out to the deck, watch the morning’s diners fly off as I approach, and refill the feeder. By the time I return inside, it is once again happily occupied, with one bird quickly becoming two, three, or often up to the allowable maximum of eight.
So consider this as a paean to impulse buying – or as a paean to the feeding habits of goldfinches, if you prefer. It matters not which you choose, since the result is the same to me for I am enjoying close-up views of one of nature’s beauties and my faith in the chasing of fantasies has been renewed – no matter how big or small my fantasies may turn out to be.
