Poor Richard’s Almanac

Can’t we do anything for ourselves?! March 21, 2009

It’s me, Richard Saunders of Poor Richard’s Almanac fame, here today to talk about perceived helplessness. The other night, my girlfriend, Bridget, and I were heading over to Hawk’s Haven to have dinner with Silence Dogood and our friend Ben. We decided to stop in at Petco and pick up some parakeet treats as a “Welcome home!” present for OFB and Silence’s new parakeets, Taco, Belle, and Laredo. The colorful trio—Taco is blue and white, Belle is yellow, and Laredo is bright green and yellow—have been brightening the lives of Silence, OFB, and their yellow-naped Amazon, Plutarch, since their other much-loved parrot, Marcus Hookbill, and parakeet Willow died.

Silence had told us how much the parakeets loved millet sprays, so we thought we’d pick up a bag, and maybe get a can of honey-, fruit-, or veggie and greens-enriched treat while we were at it. But we were a bit stunned by the giant rack of parakeet seed, pellets, treats, and toys in the Petco, and it took quite a while to decide that we were sticking with our original choices, since we knew they’d be hits. While Bridget was choosing the treat mix, my eyes strayed to the huge wall display of wild bird seed and feeders nearby. And I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

There, prominently displayed in packed ranks, were 2-liter plastic birdseed dispensers. Let’s backtrack for a second here: Several years ago, I’d heard that a company was making an inexpensive kit that let you convert the ubiquitous 2-liter soda bottles into birdfeeders. I loved the idea of creative recycling, but wanted to make sure it would work. So I went to my local Agway and plunked down about $3.99 for a kit, which included a plastic feeder tray with perches and a hanger. If this worked, instead of spending bazillion dollars for a high-end feeder, you’d have a capacious feeder that would only require weekly (as opposed to daily) filling, and you’d be turning trash into birdfeeding gold.

Here’s how you put one of these kits together: First, rinse out an empty 2-liter soda bottle and discard the cap. When the bottle is dry, use a scissors to cut off the plastic soda label so you have a clear bottle and can monitor the seed level. Use the spearlike ends of the plastic hanger to punch holes on two sides of the soda bottle near the bottom and insert the hanger. Next, fill the bottle with birdseed. Finally, screw the feeder tray onto the cap end, take the bottle feeder outside, hang it up (I used a metal hook suspended from a branch, as I do for all my feeders), and you’re done. I ask you: Does this sound hard?!

Well, some manufacturer must have decided that it was too challenging for the average American, since they’d gone to the trouble to preattach the empty 2-liter soda bottles. And, if the number and prominence of them in the Petco display is any indication, they’re a hot seller. Yikes!

I went over to see if the manufacturer had included any improvements over my little kit, but no. My homemade feeder had worked beautifully, but I could have suggested two improvements: A bigger seed tray, which would have created more perching space, and one of the dome-shaped clear plastic baffles that wild bird companies typically sell as squirrel deterrents. I never saw a squirrel at my bottle feeder, but if it rained or snowed, the moisture gummed up the seed outlets and I had to take the tray off and clean them out. A baffle might have helped the seed stay dry.

But these bottle feeders’ trays were identical to my kit’s and there was no rain baffle in sight. The good folks who made them simply saved us the trouble of recycling our own bottles, doubtless adding at least a few bucks to their bottom line in the process. Sheesh!

Poor Bridget, OFB, and Silence were subjected to quite a tirade from me on this subject all through Silence’s wonderful dinner. (She’d sauteed mushrooms, sweet onions, diced fennel bulb, yellow bell pepper, minted artichoke hearts, and kalamata olives in herb-infused olive oil, then served the sauce over pasta with shredded Asiago cheese and accompanied it with a huge, fantastic salad and Cabernet Sauvignon, in case you’re wondering. She calls this a “simple” dinner!)

The subject of my rant was this: Have we become a nation of aging infants? Must we be spoon-fed everything in our lives? Pre-packaged, pre-cooked, pre-portioned, pre-digested (wait, Bridget says I have to take that out): Why buy a bag of carrots, slice them, and eat them as snacks when we can buy pre-packaged carrot sticks for three times more? Why buy a box of cereal and pour our own when we can buy “convenient” cereal paks, or stick a potato in the oven when we can buy dried, flaked, frozen, “boil-in-bag,” or even get a cold potato pre-cooked and stuffed from the deli counter? Yuck.

And on and on. Remote controls, electronic car keys, blah blah blah. Why exert yourself at all when you can punch a button instead? Why screw in your own empty soda bottle when you can buy one that’s pre-screwed? I guess it’s obvious that I think that, if we’ve really come to that, it’s not the only thing that’s screwed. Our poor blog mentor and hero, Ben Franklin, must be spinning in his grave.