Outdoor Critter Food Bank

I’m a sucker for gadgets, especially new-technology stuff. Some work, others not so much. Two years ago I bought a solar-powered pedestal birdbath, which was fabulous. For a while. It was two-tiered, spouted water up through a little tube that came as a sparkling stream out of the top. The birds loved it, and so did I. But it gave up after six weeks and I could never get it to work again, despite cleaning off the solar panel, installing a new motor assembly sent by the manufacturer, who was clearly having problems with the thing, since the person at customer service mistook me for another unhappy solar-powered birdbath buyer. I’ve also got two Soki solar lanterns, one of which has done US Postal Service duty through rain and sleet and dark of night, the other of which has not worked once.

I’m most attracted to the gismos intended to make sustaining wildlife easier This year after the first really cold snap, I bought lower-tech gismo: a heated birdbath, a blessing for the critters (and me, since I don’t have to keep slogging out to keep an unheated one filled and thawed).

This conversation about gadgets is actually only adjacent to what’s really on my mind, which is how we help wildlife without making it a fulltime job for ourselves. I plant to supply critters, especially birds and other pollinators, throughout the seasons. I don’t believe in buying bird food, which attracts the rats and makes the birds dependent. But I do believe in giving them all the natural help we can. In winter, instead of clear-cutting the garden, I leave the seed heads waving. They are usually denuded by spring.

But right now, the gardens are still smothered beneath about 18 inches of snow. Only a few seed heads wave above that blanket. Even with very little to offer, the poor critters, desperate for food, come. Yesterday evening, about 100 Canada geese landed in my back yard to glean what they could from the seed heads and garden detritus I’d left as well as the little bits of brown lane starting to peek out of the snow. I’m going to scatter corn for them this evening, leftover from my ill-starred attempt to heat the house with a more environmentally friendly corn stove. Scattering the corn, a use of what has otherwise been wasted and stored in metal trash cans, is not baiting – which is illegal – since I won’t shoot the geese. It’s one neighbor helping another in tough times.