Unintended consequences

A Post a Day in May 26/31

We like to feed the birds in our urban setting, so pretty much year-round we have feeders out for them, filled with seeds and suet and, in the spring migration, oranges for the orioles, which have been plentiful this year. The flooding in the southern regions of Manitoba has meant that the normal food sources are not available to them. We even had a hummingbird come by, so we now have a feeder for those little beauties, too.

In the winter months, the woodpeckers are wonderful; we get all three kinds here: the Downy, the Hairy, and the Pileated. And, of course, the usual assortment of little birds, the Slate-coloured Juncos among them, as the season shifts towards spring. This year, it was while the Juncos were plentiful that we got some unexpected action in the front yard.

I was working at the dining room table, which overlooks the front yard. It was an overcast day, with some late snow falling, when, suddenly, I saw a great motion and commotion through the window. It was as if something was coming down from the heavens.

The hawk landed in
our neighbour's yard, and
he captured this image.

Well, not exactly, but pretty close: A hawk had, indeed, swooped down from a high tree branch and was charging the Juncos on the ground and they were scurrying to find cover or to fly away. It was like a bad-scene snow-globe event: everything whirling in the air. We didn’t see any carnage, so maybe all the juncos escaped unscathed. What drama!

This got me thinking about the unintended consequences of something as peaceful and generous as feeding the birds: We want to attract and feed a bunch of them, and this, in turn, creates the perfect setting for a bird of prey, such as the Sharp-shinned Hawk, that invaded our front yard. It’s all perfectly normal and natural, except for the fact that we have artificially created that perfect setting by putting out food — by interfering in the natural order of things. So typically human.

Equally true is that the path to hell is paved with good intentions. We mean well, and we might even do good in the moment, but over the longer term, who knows exactly what seeds of unintended consequences we are sowing? Sometimes, they look like that hawk. Other times, they look like a sunflower growing out of almost nothing in the back lane: a bird, or maybe a squirrel, must have dropped a seed. 

I don’t think it’s possible to entirely avoid unintended consequences, but we can hope that we cause more sunflowers than hawks.

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Land acknowledgement: I respectfully recognize that I live on the original lands of Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.

Photo of hawk by Bryan Harder