For the Birds

Written by Laird Long

Hal Feders loved birds: all kinds of birds. He loved watching them, listening to them, feeding them, and, on occasion, eating them and their byproducts. He kept chickens, geese and peacocks on his rural property, and he’d just recently excavated and then watered a large duck pond in back of his house.

He hoped to attract a wide range of wild waterfowl with his pond and even had in mind stocking it with a couple of swans. So, he was more than a little excited when he woke up one morning to find a pair of green-headed mallards floating in his brand-new paddling sanctuary.

He rushed down to the edge of the pond to welcome his first billed guests. But they quickly duck-paddled away from him, over to the other side of the pond. “Skittish, huh?” Hal said. “Well, I’ll soon fix that.”

He ran back to his small barn to get the fifty-pound sack of birdseed he’d purchased in town the previous day. But when he threw the barn door open and looked in the corner where he’d dumped the bag of mixed seeds, he found it gone.

Hal searched the entire barn, his chicken coop and the area around both. There was no sack of birdseed. “Am I cuckoo,” he mused, scratching his beak, “or did someone steal my seed?”

He could not detect any footprints inside or around his barn, other than the ones he’d made in his search for the missing sack. And the short, gravel driveway that led from his home to the dirt road out front seemed to be devoid of any tire tracks, except for the ones he’d laid down with his pick-up truck the previous afternoon.

It was an awful heavy sack of seed for one man or woman to carry too far on foot, so Hal’s suspicions immediately fell on his four neighbors who lived in relatively close proximity to his place. He started off on his quest to find the dirty bird who’d filched his seed, flying across the road and up the driveway of his nearest neighbor, Tor Hansen.

“Hey, Tor, have you seen my bag of birdseed!?” he yelled into the screened front door of Tor’s house.

The man’s huge body loomed into view behind the wire mesh. “You dumb cluck! Why would I want birdseed? I’ve got forty acres of sunflowers growing out back. The last thing I need is a flock birds. And I don’t appreciate a quack like you bringing them into the neighborhood.”

Hal regarded the man’s angry, bearded face. Tor had never been a friendly giant neighbor. “Well … you’ve got a canary, don’t you? I can hear it singing right now.”

“Tweeter? He isn’t going to eat a fifty-pound sack of birdseed in a month of Sundays.”

“Aha!” Hal crowed. “How’d you know it was a ‘fifty-pound’ sack of birdseed that was missing?”

Tor snorted. “I saw you draggin’ it into your barn from my front window yesterday. I’ve got eagle eyes, see.” And with that, the man slammed the inner door in Hal’s face.

Hal trudged up the road to the neighbor adjoining the west side of his property, Billy Mumms. As he walked across the man’s green, trimmed front yard, he glanced up at the two large birdhouses sitting atop twenty-foot poles on either side of the lawn.

“Hal,” Billy said, bobbing his head in greeting. The angular man with the hawk nose was just coming out of the front door of his house as Hal arrived, a watering can, not a sack of birdseed, in his hand.

“Somebody waddled off with a bag of birdseed I just bought,” Hal explained. “Have you seen anyone carrying something like that around, Billy?”

The man gave a quick shake of his bony head, eyes darting left and right as he watered the roses that decorated the front of his house. “Hey, Sylvester, get out of there!” he chirped at his cat, hiding amongst the rose bushes.

Hal looked up at the birdhouses again. There were four or five purple martins fluttering around the towering feather-nesters. “Say, what’d you feed all those purple martins, Billy?” he casually asked. “There sure are a lot of them.”

Billy cocked his head. “Nothing; they eat mosquitoes and other flying insects.”

Hal whacked a bloodsucker that had just landed on his arm. “I guess they don’t get all of them,” he said.

“Nope. Not all.”

Hal walked back down the road, past his and Tor’s property, to Cheryl Judson’s place. The sixty year-old widow lived by herself in a small bungalow just east of Hal’s modest spread. He found her in her backyard, chopping wood.

“What’s up, Hal?” Cheryl asked, wiping the sweat from her brow with one hand, clutching her twin-bladed axe with the other. The razor-sharp blades glinted in the sun. Hal glanced from the axe to the creek that ran in back of Cheryl’s house. There was a mama duck and seven fuzzy baby ducks floating close to the far bank of the creek. “Uh, you haven’t seen a fifty-pound bag of birdseed around, have you, Cheryl? I’m missing one.”

The woman spat on the ground and ran her finger along one of the blades of the axe. “I don’t have a need for your birdseed, if that’s what you’re squawking about, Hal. I don’t encourage birds or waterfowl – their chirping and quacking keeps me up nights.”

“No! No,” Hal squeaked. “I’m not accusing anyone.” He skirted around the woman, closer to the babbling brook, interested in getting a better look at the ducklings. “I’m just, you know … asking around.”

Cheryl grunted and placed another piece of firewood on the chopping block. She swung the axe down with a heavy thunk, cleaving the wood clean in two. As Hal watched, the mama duck and her brood swam across the creek towards him, quacking eagerly.

“Guess you’ll be going,” Cheryl said, shouldering her axe.

“Guess so,” Hal agreed. He waved at the ducks and scooted past Cheryl and across the road.

Stan Mifflin lived directly across from Cheryl. The eccentric forty something year old owned a huge, ramshackle house and two equally ramshackle greenhouses. He grew and sold exotic plants, when he wasn’t working on some other project.

Today, Hal could see, the chunky man was working on constructing what looked like another greenhouse in the field behind his home. “More space for your Venus flytraps and pitcher plants, Stan?” Hal asked.

Stan dropped his saw and shook Hal’s hand, always eager to explain his latest project to any passerby. “No, sir. I’m building an aviary. What do you think of that?”

“Really?” Hal responded, with actual interest.

“Yes, sir. I’ve already got two scarlet macaws, and I’m going to start breeding them. Here, I’ll show you.”

Stan led Hal inside his house and introduced him to two large, colorful birds perched in his kitchen. “Aren’t they beautiful?” he raved.

“They are,” Hal agreed, admiring the birds’ bright red, blue and yellow plumage.

“And they’re just the start. I’m going to raise all kinds of exotic parrots and cockatoos and such.”

“Really? I guess you’re going to need a lot of birdseed, then – to feed them all?” Hal slyly asked.

“Awk! Nuts and fresh fruit only, please!” the larger of the two birds cawed in reply, shocking Hal.

“They’re pretty picky about their diet,” Stan cackled.

“Uh-huh,” Hal said as he and the bird exchanged beady-eyed stares.

“Awk! Don’t be a stranger!” it cawed, as Hal exited the house.

On the walk back to his own home, Hal thought about all he’d seen and heard during his inquiries. And then, suddenly, he stopped in his tracks and snapped his fingers, realizing that one of his neighbors had lied to him. He tapped the side of his own beak in recognition – knowing now which neighbor had flown the coop with his sack of birdseed.