A Minor Bluebird Parable

And the importance of beauty offsets

Apr 28, 2024

As often happens around here — though not often enough to alleviate my conscience — I’m going to forego politics this week if you don’t mind. And if you do mind, maybe you should write your own Substack, because I’m going to do it anyway. I know there are all manner of political outrages right now, and everyone gets nervous when you ask them to even temporarily abandon their hate stations. Though in fairness to the haters, there’s plenty worth hating. Here are my Top Four Objects of Ire this week:

1. Professional Trump remora/veep hopeful/South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem took a much-needed break from Botoxing to confess in her new book that she executed (by gunshot) her 14-month-old wirehaired pointer, Cricket, for the imaginary crimes of being a bad hunting dog and killing some chickens, as just about every dog I’ve ever known would do left to its own devices. It’s an unlikely feat, as Noem has unexpectedly proven that having sex with Corey Lewandowki is only the second most revolting thing you can be accused of. Sources close to Noem tell me that next up, she has her eye on her kid’s pet bunny. That lazy-ass, big-eared welfare case just sits around in wood chips, eating carrots all day. Buck-toothed loser! Which is why Kristi might have to put a slug in it. Maybe then, Mr. Trump will notice her, if her suck-up birthday wishes to Melania didn’t do the trick. After all, what pagan god doesn’t like animal sacrifice?

2. The Supreme Court seemed to be doing stretching exercises last week to possibly turn themselves into original-intent contortionists who might give the Serial Defendant an immunity pass (thus confirming what Donald Trump’s maintained all along: that he’s above the law), so that he can conduct his 2024 presidential campaign somewhere besides America’s courtrooms. No decision has been rendered yet, and maybe the Supremes won’t roll over for Trump. But do you trust Clarence Thomas to do the right thing? I don’t. After all, he has to go on vacations-wealthy-benefactors-pay-for with his insurrectionist wife, who would probably like to see Trump serve a third term, since it’s unclear if she recognizes he’s not presently serving his second.

3. Anchored by Columbia University, our college youth (and plenty of faculty), nationwide, seem to have temporarily given up on hating people who won’t use their stupid, imaginary pronouns in order to get back to basics: hating The Jews. I don’t like the IDF’s trigger-happiness/how many civilian deaths there have been in Gaza, either. The same way I don’t like how Hamas made a calculated move to use the entire Palestinian population as a punishment sponge when they went on their raping/killing/hostage-taking spree six months ago. It’s an endlessly complicated situation. And if anyone has any good answers — besides finding some uneasy peace — they don’t seem to have articulated them. But I don’t quite see how painting a swastika on some Jewish coed’s dorm room or gouging one in the eye with a Palestinian flagpole while turning your American campus into Hamasapalooza is going to resolve matters. Maybe the antisemitic left (Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, et al.) grew jealous of the antisemitic right (Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, Moscow Marge, et al.) and the former decided to give the latter a run for it. It’s a not-so-refreshing reminder that just when you think you couldn’t loathe one side any more than you already do, the other side yet again proves that no side has the market cornered on loathsomeness.

4. The other day, I received a $100 dollar photo ticket for parking in a bus zone in D.C., as I ran in to my favorite empanada stand (celebrate diversity!) to buy a couple on my way to shad fishing up the Potomac. Weird, I thought — I’ve parked there hundreds of times for empanada dash-ins, and never noticed a camera. But that’s because there isn’t a camera there. Not a stationary one. The rapacious, revenue-hungry local D.C. government — ever-eager to find new ways to bleed motorists dry, as more restaurants in the city keep going tits-up from all the commuters who now, for some mysterious reason, prefer to work from home — has deputized Metrobuses, arming them with cameras to do their dirty work for them. Though in fairness to the Vichy bus-driving collaborators, I probably should’ve known my spot was too good to be true. As my friend Emily Ferguson has observed of D.C. traffic dynamics: "If you've found a good parking space, it's illegal."

But as I said, I’m not going to write about politics. Even if I just wrote about politics. (Think of me as the Walt Whitman of Substack: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself.”) So let’s get on to more important things, like bluebirds. I’ve written about them on several occasions in these pages before. Sometimes, in elaborate fashion, sometimes as a throwaway.

They likely keep recurring, not only because of my enduring fondness for the bird that Thoreau said “carries the sky on his back.” But because the box I erected for them several years ago sits right outside my writing room. I’m no sportswriter. But I believe in the sportswriter’s credo to write whatever’s happening right in front of your face. And besides, I often find bluebirds more interesting than my own pieces. (If you can relate, please do stay out of my comments section.) So they provide a welcome distraction.

Also, even if I’m not convinced of the concept of “carbon offsets” — buying redemption for your carbon emissions — I vehemently believe in what I call beauty offsets: that taking in the splendor of the natural world can tame the beast that rages within, often due to unnatural agitations.

I’ve graduated something like 14 broods since becoming a bluebird nerd. But last summer, I lost two prospective broods when vandalizing sparrows wrecked havoc on two different clutches. All by their lonesome, sparrows look cute and harmless enough. But they are the vermin of the sky, as every bluebird landlord knows. Or maybe more like the Mongol hordes. They destroy just for the fun of it.

Which is why, many years ago, I bought a Sparrow Spooker from some guy on the internet named “Uncle Blaine.” “Unc,” as I call him — even though we’re not related — sent me a deluxe rack with mounting brackets from which stream silver and red Mylar ribbons. Which makes your bluebird house look like some bumpin’ quinceañera is going on. The streamers don’t seem to spook bluebird parents, but theoretically scare the bejesus out of pesky sparrows, who are known to perch in the holes of bluebird houses, and not only destroy eggs, but to even sometimes behead live bluebird babies and parents with their hard beaks, typically used for cracking seeds when not cracking bluebird skulls. I can’t overemphasize that sparrows are the Vladimir Putins of the bird world. There are photos of their war crimes all over bluebird sites, though I will not be including any here. They’re too upsetting.

As the exterminator literature indicates, sparrows don’t just cause bluebird genocide — they cause human headaches, as well. Aggressive little pricks, they often push out more desirable songbirds from your feeders. You don’t need an alarm clock, if you have a lot of sparrows, because they like to start singing at first light. Their nests often clog gutters and downspouts. And their sparrow splat contains uric acid, which can eat a hole straight through your car paint.

I don’t think I’m being too harsh when I walk outside, with five of them crowding out all the other birds from my all-purpose feeder that hangs from our willow, and say, “F*&$ off, sparrows! You greedy little gluttons.”

Since 2018, when I first put up the Sparrow Spooker, I hadn’t had an invasion. But as the years ticked by, and weather’n’wind beat up my quinceañera streamers, shortening them to stubs, the sparrows seemed to have regained their nerve. When a nice bluebird couple moved into my bluebird house a little early this spring (they are cavity-nesters, by nature), then laid five eggs the light-blue color of Tiffany jewel boxes, I was joyous, as I always am when old friends return. But I was also alarmed. A chronic procrastinator, I’d meant to order my replacement Mylar off Amazon, but hadn’t quite gotten around to it. I was leaving the bluebird eggs vulnerable, with my amputated streamers. The second I saw the eggs, I went in and placed my order. It would get here in a couple days — you’re not all bad, Jeff Bezos — but alas, a day was all it took for those feathered little barbarian Putins to go on the march, invading my own personal Ukraine.

There weren’t even shell fragments on the ground this time, as there’d been in the past. They seemed to have consumed the eggs whole. Though I didn’t personally witness the massacre, I know it wasn’t a snake, because I have double baffles on my bluebird box. And even a triple-jointed snake couldn’t get around them. Plus, as I’ve written before, when a snake once made it into my pre-baffled box, consuming all the nestlings, I pulled him out, and split him open with a shovel in a white-hot rage, throwing his lifeless carcass into the woods, sending a warning shot to the snake community, which hasn’t bothered me or my bluebirds since.

But the sparrows are another matter. They’re stubborn little bastards. And they’d just destroyed a third clutch, what was to be my first brood of the year, suffocating the promise of rebirth and spring like the merchants of death that they are. I relayed my problems to a bluebird consigliere of my acquaintance, an old high-school friend/bluebird activist. She told me sparrows are a forever-problem, and that I should put my spooker up after the first egg is laid, not after they hatch. Even if it pisses off the bluebird parents for a short spell, they get used to it, and shortly return and get over it to do their necessary procreative business. She offered to let me borrow her sparrow trap, as well.

At first, I thought maybe that’s a good idea. I’ll trap some sparrows, then drive them far away and set them loose. But she reminded me that those birds, like most birds, have wings. And they’ll fly right back. You kind of have to snuff them, if you really want to be rid of them.

Ooof. I hadn’t bargained for that. I’m not going to pretend I don’t have any predatory instinct. I hook hundreds if not thousands of fish a year in the mouth with sharp steel. Though I love fish, and just want to see them for a second, before letting them go. Plus, you saw what I wrote about snakes/Kristi Noem upstairs. I’m not anti-violence in all cases. Sometimes, it’s justified.

But I didn’t get into the bird-housing/feeding business to kill birds that I find less desirable than other birds. When I looked up on the internet how people dispose of their trapped sparrows, there is all manner of sparrow genocide tips: from neck-snapping, to smashing the encasement they were trapped in against cement, to gassing them with engine-starter ether.

No thanks. I hate sparrows for what they do to bluebirds. But I don’t hate the cute little punks that much. I’d rather let God be their judge, while I merely scare the shit out of them with my Sparrow Spooker.

Which I put up again, after Bezos delivered. This time, with proper-length streamers, after a bluebird pair —probably the same one as before — moved back in just a day after the eggs massacre, and built a new cup nest, intricately constructed from dried grass and pine needles, always an architectural marvel. My bluebird consigliere suggested, after the last batch of death, that I remove the old nest where the murders had happened. Let them start anew. It pained me to do so, because I know how much labor and bluebird sweat goes into that nest. When they’re building, I always put extra mealworms in the tray I hang off the back of their box, knowing they could use the protein. So when I pulled the old cup nest out, and threw it in the woods, I felt like I was defiling a temple. A temple that not only brings them life, but brings their life to me.

But it didn’t seem to bother the bluebirds, who just moved on. Who didn’t let the past haunt them. Or spend all kinds of time taking inventory of what had been lost, then talking endlessly to their therapist about it. They just looked forward, and built a new nest. And laid four new eggs, which I expect to become Brood #15.

I check on them every morning, making sure the sparrows haven’t destroyed this thing I love. And nearly every morning, Mama Bluebird is sitting on that nest. She has her head tucked low, and her eyes peer up at me, trustingly, just like my dog does when I sneak him his eighth or ninth snack of the day, against my wife’s orders. She probably should be alarmed, just by animal instinct. But she doesn’t fly off. She stays on the nest, as I coo softly at her, telling her I’ll see her tomorrow, while gently closing the box flap. Maybe I’ve imprinted myself on these birds after years of feeding and caring for them, as some say happens. Or maybe I’m just a very weird-looking overgrown sparrow, here to do her harm. She can’t know for sure. But she seems to trust me, and to trust in goodness, generally. That there are forces out there who love life, as with the life she is protecting. Who prize creation over destruction. And she’s right. I want so badly to pet her on the head, but I resist. Not wishing to give her one more thing to worry about. To cause her further stress.

Because she has enough on her already. Even though she’s free as a bird, she has to carry the sky on her back.

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Slack Tide by Matt Labash

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