The Bird feeder
A Microcosm of Society
“Watch it wiggle, see it jiggle…” yes the jello commercial jingle ran through our heads as we watched the jelly bellies of the squirrels this morning. Each morning we fill the little plastic houses with seeds, and watch a new improvisation of a colorful play unfold in front of our windows as we sip our Chai tea. Every morning, it's like a scene from a wildlife soap opera playing out in front of our window. The chickadees, finches, jays, sparrows, morning doves, nuthatches, and cardinals all vying for the prime spots at the feeder. And those squirrels! They are so fat from stealing the seeds — they behave like a bunch of party animals so drunk they fall off the branches, while the avian world struggles to feed off their scraps.
And just when we thought we had seen it all, enter "Vladamir Putin" (pronounced like the Canadian Poutine), the hawk who's turned our peaceful morning play into a scene straight out of The Hunger Games. May the odds NEVER be in his favor!
But here’s the thing: we have a seemingly unlimited amount of birdseed — we are talking serious abundance in our buckets here! And we have not just mom, but a whole house full of altruists waiting to pop into service to help a poor bird like Cornelius if they bump themselves. We actually we have everything we need and more to build a generous feeding system — so why do we keep doing what we are doing simply filling and valuing these little plastic silos/houses of wealth? Seriously, at some point we must look at each other and say the system we are supporting is simply is not working and it is high time to start building something better.
Please excuse my soapbox: take Zita Cobb’s Shorefast model on Fogo Island — it would not be hard to set this up in Singing Bridge. The IRA funds now allow us to design a blended finance shared value platform to derrisk rural communities that were hard hit like Fogo Island and create community replenishing funds. We can spin-up a community fund with socially responsible businesses that give 1+% back to the community fund creating a self-sustaining system — this is not complicated and the good news is we have everything we need and more! We live in an age of abundance with machine learning overhauling our outdated models so let’s design a more caring compassionate wellbeing economy model and make it FUN and full of JOY! Think of leaving our kids a system that values resilient communities, with community owned power, real estate brokerages, car and bike banks, and stores and housing and a whole assortment of other healthy resilient community oriented businesses. Let’s design a new model where not just the greedy squirrels, who are so drunk on their feasts that they are falling out of the trees, while the rest struggle to survive. We have enough when we work together!
Let’s prepare ourselves now for the next climate shock and get out of our Hitchcockian, toilet paper hoarding minds and design forward more Shorefast models, where our future generations say: thank you for learning from the animal kingdom and not being a bunch of nut-hoarding, drunken squirrels.
Please someone kick me off the soapbox — I promise to find the giggle zone again tomorrow.
So where do the flocks of insatiable Starlings fit into the microcosm? Perhaps Singing Bridge is too far north for these freeloaders but down here in Massachusetts they're emptying the feeders faster than we can fill them and ruining things for Cornelius' southern kinfolk. I'm thinking maybe a giant border wall will make us ornithologically great again?
Actually, Singing Bridge almost always has a perfect mixture of soapbox and down-home humor. No need to change a thing. Today’s column was perfect.