I know it is raining. What else is new? Rain with heavy white flakes like pieces of white bread falling; the ground is white, but barely so. Under the sheet of snow is mud. The mud season now runs from November to May. In the good old days, the mud season was limited to a few weeks in March. Thankfully, our glacier melted 14,000 years ago, so we don’t have to worry about that.

I feed the birds. I’m concerned about the quality of the seed. What’s in it? With glyphosate and other herbicides in 90 % of our food, what’s in the bird food? Are they eating traces of herbicides too? It is well known that low doses of glyphosate can alter the gut microbiota composition in humans, but what about in birds? In addition to its ubiquitous use as a GMO crop weedkiller, glyphosate is commonly sprayed on grains right before harvest to aid in the timely drying of the crop. Of course, that is insane, but nobody stops it. In an unrelated form of contamination, back in 2012, Scotts Miracle-Gro was fined 12.5 million dollars for selling contaminated birdseed. The company applied insecticides to the seed to help prevent insect damage during storage. Yet, an even bigger threat to birds are the billions of planting seeds treated with neonicotinoids. North America has lost 3 billion birds since 1970. It is estimated that 67 million birds are lost to pesticides worldwide each year. The widespread spraying of insecticides has reduced the population of insects to catastrophically low levels. Those birds that don’t live on seeds, live on insects. It is a double-barreled extinction.

The other day I watched a video of insects hatching above and around a small lake in Africa. The air was thick with bugs, wall to wall. Africa has not yet contaminated their agricultural land to the same degree America has, and you can still witness the primordial life force of the unpoisoned environment. It is increasingly hard to believe our world was that way at one time. We can barely remember our youth when the world we inhabited still had healthy insect populations, so healthy, on a summer evening, I would have to stop the car and wash the windshield. We all did. The atmosphere contained clouds of bugs. The earth crawled. A visiting cityite could not sleep from the cacophony of the insects in the woods at night.

So, I throw out the seeds on the ground and on the bird feeder platform and I don’t know what’s in it. I would have to be a chemist, I guess, or a botanist, to figure it all out. I hope someone is looking at it. When we write our culture’s obituary, we will need to make the proper footnotes.

The blue jays come in as a group. Many people mistake blue jays for bluebirds because, well, blue jays are blue birds but not bluebirds. Bluebirds are much smaller than blue jays, with reddish breasts, like the robin but smaller than the robin, and without the black and white streaks found in the feather jackets of the jays. Bluebirds rarely, if ever, eat seeds, so, I never see them at the birdfeeder. They will hang out in the corner of fields and hedgerows in small family groups, and sleep overnight in the nesting boxes, keeping each other warm. But the jays, the blue jays, when they come in, take over the feeder, and dodge each other as they pound down the seed and peck open the sunflower seeds they hold between their feet on the edge of the feeder. Not much messes with them, but a male cardinal will make a stand from time to time and settle into its own corner, unmolested. Around 1900, to be called a “Jay” meant you were an uncouth hick without knowledge of common etiquette. We have all heard the term “jay walking”: this expression is derived from the bird, not the other way around. This term was predated by the derogatory “jay-driving”. A “jay-driver” was a person who drove his buggy on any part of the roadway he wanted, left right, no matter. A wagon or buggy went where you wanted it to go, and you parked wherever there was a hitching post. Those who could not adapt to driving on the right were called “jay-drivers”. The term “jay-walking” soon emerged to describe those walkers who crossed the street without regard to crosswalks, or oncoming motor cars, or buggies, or wagons. And that’s just how blue jays are.

More than once my old man got called in for “jay-driving.”

Judge Kelso: “Sam, cop says you were driving on the wrong side of the road.”
Sam: “That’s right.”
Judge Kelso: “Can you explain?”
Sam: “I was swerving to miss the pothole coming out of the village. With all the tools I have in the back, would have popped the tire on my S-10.”

Judge Kelso: “Case dismissed. And Sam?”
Sam: “Yes, Judge?”
Judge Kelso: “Could you drive a little slower next time? Maybe you won’t pop the tire.”
Sam: “Cows need milking.”
Judge Kelso: “Even so.”
Sam: “Yes Judge.”