Birds are the opposite of doom-scrolling

Reports from my first week with a bird feeder camera

I was twelve the first time my family went to Sanibel Island. I’d recently asked for a nice camera as a Christmas present. I had aspirations to be a photographer. Or a filmmaker. I had a lot of aspirations.

At any rate, the camera was for the whole family, but my parents let me loose with it for that week on the beach. When we got back and developed the film (just the memory of holding one of those 35mm film canisters makes me smile), what we had were mostly pictures of birds. A few sunsets. Occasionally an actual person. Then more birds.

Obviously, I was in love.

Part of it was that the birds on Sanibel were different. They were bigger. There were cranes and pelicans and herons and ibises and sandpipers and gulls and terns and egrets and cormorants and, yes, anhingas (also called piano birds) and frigate birds (or magnificent frigate birds). Do not get me started on how cool anhingas and frigate birds are! There were so many birds I’d never seen before.

But maybe even more than their newness, all those birds were right there. Right on the beach, standing next to my chair. Or floating on the waves just off the shore. Or, in the case of some of the gulls, stealing your potato chip out of your hand if you weren’t paying attention. Or for the egrets and the cranes, standing next to my parents as they fished, waiting to snap up a scrap of bait. If I fell asleep on a beach towel on the sand and woke up, there was likely to be an ibis right there, staring at me with its bright blue eye against that red backdrop.

I chased those birds everywhere with my camera. I was a child of National Geographic and Nature on PBS. I did everything I could to get as close to those birds as I could. I crept up on them slowly. I sat very still and hoped they’re come toward me. I took picture after picture and, remember, this was when film actually cost money, both to buy and develop.

Those birds were part of why I fell in love with Sanibel. It was a dream I’d never known I had, to be that close to nature. To spend hours watching the sandpipers picking the periwinkles out of the sand at the surf. Or floating in the ocean and feeling like I could reach my hand up and touch the undersides of the pelicans as they skimmed the water. Having animals that close and easily available felt like the best kind of miracle. It still does when I go to Sanibel, almost 40 years later.

Yes, there were also birds back in Kentucky and later Indiana. But those birds were mostly small. And almost always far away. They were skittish creatures. I could watch them at a feeder through a window and that was entertaining. With a pair of binoculars out my window, I could catch the birds in what felt like private moments, having a good scratch as they balanced on the telephone line. Or fussing with each other as they lined up on the wire.

I developed yet more bird-related aspirations. I wanted to be the kind of person who can identify birds by sound. I’ll confess, my knowledge is still pretty basic (I know what a blue jay and a crow and a mourning dove sound like, as well as a hawk and a red-winged blackbird, but I can never quite internalize the difference between a robin and a cardinal). I wanted to be the kind of person who drove over to the national wildlife refuge in the spring to see the sandhill cranes. I didn’t want to be obsessive about it, but I wanted to start keeping a life list. I wanted to be like Karen Davis of Life in the Real World, whose camera and dedication give her an intimate relationship with all kinds of creatures.

I’m still working on all those things, but in the meantime, I did buy a bird feeder with a camera. A few pictures on social media of birds looking cute as they stared into the cameras hooked me. On a whim, I ordered one online in the fall. Then it sat in our house, still in its box, moved from one location to another, until this week, when my husband and I finally tackled the two-person job of getting the app downloaded, the wifi set up and the feeder hung at the back of our house.

Then we waited.

“Where are the birds?” my husband asked.

“It takes time,” I reassured him. “They have to find the feeder. It could take weeks.”

The particular day we put up the feeder, as I sat in our backyard, it felt like every single bird that was usually flitting around our backyard had disappeared. It felt like a very involved and well-coordinated bird conspiracy. I mean, our neighbor next door has a couple bird feeders. It wasn’t as if the birds weren’t used to associating our space with food. So where were they?

On the second day, a female cardinal showed up. She didn’t eat any of the seed at first. The camera is motion-activated and a light comes on when the camera is recording. You can see her looking at the lights and the camera and trying to figure out what the hell is going on. She landed for a few times before she finally decided it was safe enough to grab a seed.

For the next couple of days, it was just the female cardinal. Which was fine. I loved watching her. I loved seeing up-close the way the crest on her head moves, how she can raise or lower those feathers. I loved the way she cocked her head. I loved watching her chomp on the birdseed. She came often enough that my husband gave her a name. Weebie.

“Why Weebie?” I asked.

“She looks like a Weebie,” he said.

So Weebie it is.

Our next visitor was a black-capped chickadee. He also was hesitant at first, checking out the camera. Then he grabbed a seed and flew off with it. I watched him do this over and over again. The camera caught the high-speed sight of him flying away, which was something I realized I never get to see. I read later that black-capped chickadees take seeds and hide them to eat later. Each seed is placed in a different hiding spot and the birds can remember thousands of those hiding spots.

I get notifications on my phone when the camera detects motion and takes a video. At first, the notifications were a trickle. Most of them were triggered by my husband or me going in and out our back door, as the camera detects that motion, too. It was funny to watch as each of us peered up at the birdfeed hopefully, waiting for more arrivals.

Next was a male house finch. He sat on the perch with the chickadee, as if trying to learn from the early adopter. Then he started taking seeds himself, joined shortly by a female house finch and, yesterday, our first Carolina wren, a bird I especially love for their feistiness. Today, the male cardinal has joined the female. My husband has named him Harold.

It’s silly and amusing, to be naming the birds who visit the feeder. We don’t actually know that the female cardinal is the same one every time, though given that they’re territorial, there’s a good chance that it is a repeat customer. Naming the birds is also a reflection of a sort of intimacy. Of course, I watch the cardinals out my window or from our backyard all year long. If I fall asleep or am very still in my lounge chair in our backyard, a Carolina wren will come pretty close to where I’m lying.

But seeing them that close through the camera is different. The birds come alive in a way they don’t at a distance. We learn their habits. Not surprisingly, the frequency of visits peaks in the morning and the evenings. The chickadee tends to get down into a part of the feeder that’s below the camera, like he’s shy or has already grown tired of his celebrity. The cardinals are front and center, like they’re posing. The chickadee always comes in from the left side of the camera. The finches hang out on the right.

Like on the beach in Sanibel, there is a fascination with seeing the birds up close. There is a delight. It feels like the best possible version of a reality TV show. It’s a call to pay close attention. In the little videos, I notice the intricate patterns of white and brown on the back of the finches. I notice the differences between the long, narrow beak of the Carolina wren and the short, sturdy beak of the cardinals. I see the patterns in their behaviors—the chickadee coming back again and again in a short period of time, while the cardinals tend to spread out their visits. The camera has sound, so I can hear the birds, too, the sounds they make before they snatch up a seed and fly away.

Watching the camera feeder opens up a world of questions about the birds and their lives. If they tend to visit mostly in the mornings and evenings, what are they doing with the rest of their days? How do they decide whether it’s okay to share the feeder with another bird or not? What do they think about the strange light that flashes on every time they land on the perch? What is the chickadee doing with his back turned to the camera, hesitating on the perch before flying away? What are they saying to each other with their chirps and trills? What might they be saying to me?

My husband read a novel once, set in a dystopian future in which all the birds had disappeared. For the next month or so, he would glance up at the sky, see a bird, and breathe a deep sigh of relief.

“The birds are still here,” he would say.

The world, of course, is full of horror. There’s more and more of it every day. I could spend all day every day absorbing that horror. It comes in an infinite supply. And when that ready supply ran out, I could make my own.

Of I could spend all day watching videos of birds, arriving at the feeder on the wing or the camera turning on when they’re already there, so that they appear to have been summoned from some magical dimension. Each video is a window into a world full of wonder that also exists, right alongside the horror. Each video is the same gift I discovered all those years ago on the beach. Nature creeping up close to us. Nature brushing shoulders. Nature living alongside us. Nature offering us, like a blessing, the gift of intimacy and community.

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Thanks to all the new subscribers. So happy to be here with you! Check out last week’s post about the beauty of a small town protest below. Special thanks to David J. Brown, who became a paid subscriber. It only costs $30, which is a real steal for supporting quality bird feeder content like this.

“One thing I know for sure—he doesn’t care about us at all!”

I’m in the process of gathering blurbs for my book, SEX OF THE MIDWEST, coming out in mid-September from Galiot Press. It’s very exciting (and a little cringe-y) to ask people to read my book, but I’ve got some great responses so far. Check out the essay at

Galiot Press Substack

about the intersection of women’s history month and small press month.

Women + Small Presses = Magic

Finally, here’s the link for my weekly list of small things you can do to stave off the apocalypse. I think the tide is turning and we’re the ones doing that hard work. Keep it up!