Bird Buddy, Rodent Enemy

This is a cautionary tale.

Sometimes Nature does not want to be surveilled.

It was last Christmas morning when my wife placed the gift on my lap. She was beaming with confidence – totally out of character for her – and even stated out loud that this gift was something I would love.

She had underestimated.

As the wrapping paper flew, the contents were revealed. It was a product called the Bird Buddy®. I had not heard of it before, but as I read and beheld the packaging, I quickly understood that this was going to be a game-changer. Best Christmas ever.

The premise behind the product is simple, but magnificent. It’s a bird feeder, but attached to the inside of the bird feeder is a camera, which camera is activated by a motion sensor, which happens to connect to your home Wi Fi. Therefore, whenever a bird comes to eat at your feeder, the camera is activated and it captures a video of the bird eating. At first, this might sound like not a big deal – that is, until you receive a notification on a cool spring morning that a Northern Cardinal has just stopped by for a quick snack, promptly followed at the buffet by a hungry Tufted Titmouse, soon after by a Red-bellied Woodpecker. As an added bonus, the whole apparatus is powered by everyone’s favorite inexhaustible power source, the Sun. [Editor’s note: astronomers predict that the Sun will turn into a white dwarf and collapse in on itself in five billion years, there or about.]

You can watch the magic right on your phone. The app not only records the action, sound and all, but even identifies the bird species for you, which in my mind is the only good AI developed to date. (No offense, and with boundless respect, oh Benevolent Computer Overlords.) If you are confused or otherwise unimpressed, the reason is that you almost never get a chance to watch birds up close. They are always so flighty. But here, as you watch a close-up of them dining on your delicious bird seed, you see how they dazzle in brilliant Technicolor. There are notifications, there are daily recaps, you can even give the birds names. My wife had wildly underestimated.

This one is named Morton Downey Junior.

One night while at a business dinner, I happened to be viewing a daily recap video of a Blue Jay going to town at the feeder. A younger colleague saw the video and was intrigued. I explained the Bird Buddy to her. She remarked that her father would love one of those. “Really? Cool. How old is your father?”

“Eighty,” she said.

No matter. Her father and I both know what’s what.

The thing I appreciate most about the Bird Buddy, and the reason my wife knew it was for me, is that it connects me on a daily basis to one of my favorite places, the backyard of our house in the country. I recognize the paradox of beholding the natural world through the screen on one’s phone, but for some reason the Bird Buddy makes it work. It’s not a substitute for being there, but the bird videos are a daily reminder that there exists a quiet place with trees and grass and birds that is out there waiting for me.

It was a majestic couple of months. At least while it lasted.

Several weeks ago, the feeder went dark. All videos suddenly stopped. Had it run out of food? That seemed unlikely, as I had just refilled it a few days before. I tried to view the live camera, but it was now perpetually off-line. This wasn’t a food issue. Something was wrong.

I manufactured an excuse to take a day trip to the house. When I got to the backyard, I saw that the Bird Buddy, which was mounted 8-feet high on the side of the house, was twisted to one side and dangling. The camera had been dislodged from the bird house and was lying on the ground ten feet away. I climbed up and tried to reconnect the camera. That’s when I saw that the wire had been severed and that the camera had been mercilessly clawed. And clawed. And clawed. The Bird Buddy had been intentionally destroyed.

What monster had done this? For what purpose? And why was the camera specifically targeted?

I immediately honed in on a suspect.

First, I knew it was not a bird. I had become quite familiar with the local birds and I knew that they were a civilized lot. They dipped in for a snack and then flew away. Then another bird would follow. Then another. They waited patiently in the queue like good Brits. Sometimes two landed at once, but they knew fighting was not allowed at the feeder. There was plenty for everyone. For their part, the birds also seemed to appreciate and respect the quid pro quo behind the Bird Buddy. From their perspective, you (the people) provide free food. In return, we (the birds) will allow ourselves to be filmed and recorded while eating. In a world of scarcity, if someone set up a web cam at the Olive Garden with a sign that said “All you can eat. The food is free as long as we get to film and record you stuffing your face for another species to gawk over,” you would probably say “that’s a good deal.” Nothing’s free in this world, and that’s a fair bargain.

No, I knew who did this. There was video evidence.

The Bird Buddy had been operative for about a month before the first squirrel figured out how to reach it. This was a different kind of movie, a completely new genre. If the bird videos were European art-house cinema, the squirrel videos were pornographic. Shock horror. Snuff films. While you might get a dainty ten seconds of a woodpecker, you got twenty consecutive videos of a gorging squirrel. He never stopped eating. This was a gastronomic nightmare straight from the Cracker Barrel. By the last video, the squirrel was noticeably and demonstrably fatter than it was during the first one.

The evidence may be circumstantial, but the last twenty recorded videos from my Bird Buddy were all of squirrels.

It’s sometimes difficult to interpret the motivations of animals. I don’t know precisely why the squirrels decided to levy a frontal assault on the entire apparatus. Perhaps the one squirrel, once satiated, was overcome by shame and wanted to destroy all video evidence of its gluttony. Maybe there was a gang feud between the squirrels and the birds, or maybe it was just a garden variety case of wanton destruction, like when they trashed the printer in Office Space. Whether we can regard the squirrels as thuggish gangsters or common vandals, it’s safe to say that their motivation was anything but innocent. In fact, I’m now fairly certain that if the squirrels could buy spray paint, they would have tagged “Fuck Your Mother” on the side of my house.

To this day, I don’t know how the squirrels were able to reach the Bird Buddy, let alone destroy it. It was mounted flush against the side of the house, well off the ground. I would have to set up a second camera, like a Ring camera (or a second Bird Buddy), facing the first one in order to figure it out. Now I’m glad I didn’t. God knows what they would have done to that second camera. I might have woken up one day with the camera in the bed next to me, along with the head of a Blue Jay.

There is only one conclusion: sometimes Nature does not want to be surveilled.