INSIGHT

By John Gierach Redstone Review

LYONS – I spent the better part of a recent Tuesday building a bird feeder. A year or two ago I mentioned to my nearest neighbors, Dana and Debbie, that I hadn’t

Gierach seen many orioles around lately and they admitted that they’d started feeding them, so the birds had all moved over to their place. Orioles eat insects and fruit, so they’re attracted to fruit jelly, and if jelly sitting outside in the summer attracts bugs, so much the better. They just amount to extra raisins in the muffin. All you need is a receptacle, so as proof of concept I fastened an old plastic butter tub from the recycle bin to a scrap of used lumber from behind the garage, suspended it from the porch roof by four eyelets and filled it with grape jelly. The board was a weathered brownish gray and the tub was dark green, but orioles are attracted to bright colors – especially orange – so as a final flourish I tied a piece of orange surveyor’s tape around it. It wasn’t pretty, but I got my first oriole within hours – a big, handsome orange and black male – and within days I had females and juveniles bickering over it. Attracting wild animals by putting out their favorite food is no great accomplishment – it’s the kind of thing people do by accident all the time – but when it’s on purpose it gives you a small glow of accomplishment. I probably picked up the habit of feeding wild birds from my maternal grandmother. She never had much money and had lived through the Great Depression, so she was a model of frugality. She grew a garden and raised chickens, reused canning jars, recycled old clothes into quilts or dish rags, depending on their condition, and so on. Buying bird seed – let alone a feeder to put it in – would have been a needless and possibly sinful extravagance, but then so was waste of any kind, so when she had stale bread or cracker crumbs, she’d scatter them in the yard for the birds because that was preferable to just throwing it away. No one knew or much cared what birds these were. Everyone knew cardinals because the males were big and red, but everything else was just a generic bird. Mostly they were brown. Every once in a while, there’d be some yellow ones. By the time we moved out of grandma’s house in the early 1950s, my mother was an aspiring mid-century housewife. She wanted to feed birds, but she wanted wild bird mix from the hardware store (mostly millet and sunflower) and a proper backyard bird feeder to put it in. Dad built the feeder: the standard three-sided lean-to design with a dowel perch and a split shake roof. Dad was a pretty good carpenter. He’d already built my sister a doll house that she still has. It’s a one-of-a-kind, two-story number that probably now qualifies as folk art.

By then Mom had expanded the birds she knew to include blue jays and crows, while anything smaller was a “sparrow.” But sometime in my early adolescent naturalist phase I got my hands on a dog-eared old leather-bound book called Birds, by Neltge Blanchan. It was published as a children’s book in 1926 and it reduced the 2,059 species of wild bird in North America to 48, which at the time seemed like a lot. I bounced around quite a bit after college, working odd jobs and living in even odder places, but when I finally lit someplace where I thought I’d stay for a while, one of the first things I did was put up a bird feeder. I built one based on Dad’s design, except I didn’t bother with the shake roof. Maybe Grandma’s phrase “needless extravagance” came to mind. Later my mother sent me a sturdy Droll Yankee pole feeder that I’ve now used continuously for nearly five decades. The plastic has yellowed some from constant exposure to sunlight and it has some extra holes where a bear chewed on it, but it’s still serviceable. She also sent me a guaranteed squirrel-proof feeder that my squirrels cracked so quickly I should have timed it because it was probably a world record. Naturally I told her it worked beautifully. At some point I started feeding hummingbirds. We had hummers around when I was young, but as a toddler I thought they were big insects and that their long, pointed bills were stingers, so I was terrified of them. Eventually I got over it. And now orioles. The ones we have around here used to be called Bullock’s orioles, but the name has been changed to northern oriole. For that matter, the rufoussided towhee is now a spotted towhee, the blue grouse is now a dusky grouse and so on. I’m convinced that taxonomists do this just to annoy old bird watchers. I got so many orioles at my feeder that it became obvious I needed a second one, so I ordered one online. Apparently, the designers of bird feeders (if that’s an actual job description) tend toward pointless and expensive extravagance, but I finally found a simple one for $20. But, of course next to the new one my old feeder looked so pitiful I had to build a better one. It’s blissfully simple: a small, square board with a low lip that encloses a small flower pot tray to hold the jelly and dowel perches off two sides that, as it turns out, the birds don’t use. Then I spray-painted it bright orange. And then after the fact I realized that for the few hours it took me to put this thing together I didn’t think once about politics, contagion, the politics of contagion, civil unrest, the threats to the upcoming election or any of the rest of it. Honestly, this stuff had been getting to me, even if I wasn’t always aware of it. When someone pointed out that a short temper was one symptom of what they’re calling COVID depression, I said, “I’m not shorttempered, Goddamn-it!” So, building a bird feeder became one of those small, but beautiful things, like fly-fishing or reading a novel, that aren’t exactly an escape, but at least amount to briefly coming up for air before you dive back in.

By Kara Bauman Redstone Review

LYONS – The Lyons Community Library is happy to expand our service hours yet again. Begin

Bauman ning September 11 we will be open by appointment between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. on Fridays. Patrons are asked to call 303-823-5165 to make an appointment time to visit the library. Appointments are available between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. on Mondays and Thursdays, between 12 p.m. and 6 p.m. on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and on Saturdays between 9 a.m. and 12 p.m. Appointments begin at the top of the hour and last 45 minutes. You’re welcome to browse the collection or use a computer during your visit. Curbside service – to pick up materials and print jobs or have documents notarized – remains available during each hour we’re open and our Wi-Fi is accessible 24 hours a day from the front porch, and east or west patios. More Adirondack chairs and other outdoor amenities are coming soon. Also coming soon is the return of statewide courier service. That means we will once again be able to place holds on and bring in materials from participating libraries from around the state. Please keep checking our Facebook page and website for the announcement of exactly when this service returns. We would like to thank everyone who participated in our Summer Reading Program this year. While it might have looked a little different than we had originally anticipated, we’re thrilled with how many participants signed up, logged books and hours, wrote reviews, and completed activities. And while there are many benefits to summer reading programs – improving reading skills, increasing desire to read, improving reading comprehension, improving memory skills, and instilling reading as a life-long habit – it’s undeniably fun to win prizes. Congratulations go out to our Continue Library on Page 14

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