Field Notes–

A Preference For Bluebirds

By Curtiss Clark

A dead cardinal turned up on the doorstep of The Bee Monday morning. How it met its end was unclear, but there he was lying intact, vibrant and portentous — an inauspicious omen at the threshold of a new week. He was buried in the weeds across the road in a quick odd ceremony involving a snow shovel and a newspaper publisher in a bow tie.

Interested observers of nature know that the process of life on this planet, when taken as a whole, is complex, elegant, and beautiful. But when taken in particular, element by element, incident by incident, and creature by creature, nature routinely and rudely trespasses on our personal preferences. For example, I prefer flying, perching, and preening cardinals to underground dead ones. On Monday morning, I didn’t get what I wanted on that score, so the week seemed to start off on the wrong foot.

We would all be a lot happier if we had no preferences and could take the world as it comes; there would be no disappointments, just undifferentiated experience. But that’s not how things work in this dualistic world. Sensations and perceptions in all their various forms, from the cellular level to the spiritual, seem to exist to help differentiate between “good” and “bad.” The whole tilt of evolution sits on the fulcrum of preference. And members of our species in particular are notoriously preferential meddlers.

Even in our yard, where Kate and I have tried to accommodate nature as best we can, we have established some obvious and clear preferences. For several years, we have maintained three bluebird boxes around the property. We prefer bluebirds to most other birds because they are rare and beautiful, so we have put out the welcome mat. But the more common and less remarkable house sparrows prefer bluebird boxes to other nesting sites, and they quickly take up residence in the boxes in the spring, thwarting our preference with their own.

The North American Bluebird Society (NABS), which is very knowledgeable and convincing in expressing its bluebird preference, has issued advisories on how to turn that dynamic around and have our preference thwart the house sparrows’. NABS, which promotes the establishment of bluebird nesting box trails, advises on its website that it is the responsibility of every nest box trail operator to ensure that no house sparrows fledge from their boxes, sternly warning that “it is better to have no nest box than to have one which fledges sparrows.” The society’s “aggressive control” measures prescribe that house sparrows “should be quickly and humanely dispatched as soon as they are captured.” There is no mention of whether a snow shovel and a newspaper publisher is required.

House sparrows outnumber all other songbirds in North America. They were introduced to this continent in the 19th Century because of another human preference: pest-free crops. The idea that these birds would eat the insects that were eating North American crops turned out to be mistaken, which is one consequence of still another human preference: easy answers to complex problems.

So this spring, when house sparrows moved into our bluebird boxes, we did not take “aggressive control” measures because our aforementioned preference for flying, perching, and preening birds to underground dead ones.

House sparrows are not wholly without merit. (A heretical view under NABS orthodoxy.) They aren’t actually sparrows. They are Old World weaver finches, which are noted for their ingenious and beautifully woven nests, which I prefer to bluebird nests from a strictly aesthetic point of view. So when the sparrows fledged early last month, I cleaned their nest materials from the boxes after admiring the remarkable assembly of twigs, grasses, and other birds’ feathers.

The very next day, the bluebirds arrived to claim the box we can see from the kitchen table, which, for that reason, is our preferred nesting box. We sit and watch flashes of blue streak through the sun and shadows as the male and female shuttle worms and larvae to hungry chicks in the box. The nestlings should fledge in the next week or so — and that makes us happy.

We would prefer that all creatures have happy lives, but there are too many competing preferences for that ever to be so. So if we scale back our expectations, it may be possible to better appreciate what presents itself on any given day, including dead cardinals on the doorstep. Even in disappointment, if we keep our eyes open, we may just spot some unexpected extraordinary thing — like a newspaper publisher in a bow tie digging in the mid-summer weeds with a snow shovel. It’s how the world works, and frankly I prefer it that way.