This photograph is from July 26, 2017 and was taken right outside my kitchen at the small bird feeder I keep there. It provides hours of entertainment in the summer.
If you only casually observe a birdfeeder you might see it as a bunch of cute little birds from different species flitting about in harmony and enjoying the feast. But when you freeze the action at 1/1600th of a second a totally different story is revealed. The birds are engaged in a genuine struggle to get as much of the food as they can, or starve.
I have several photographs like this one that show the intensity of the fighting and when I scroll through them I can’t help but draw comparisons between the birds and people. Humans have overcome many of the hardships of day-to-day survival. Most people in developed nations don’t worry about having enough food. Indeed, the problem for more than two-thirds of Americans is too much food. But the competitive, and lustful, nature of human nature causes us to create new struggles unique to our species. We can never have enough of whatever we think we want, and every day is an effort to get more. We quantify our success in life by comparing it to what others have achieved or acquired, especially others in the unrealistic world of television and the internet. It is a futile struggle of our own making.
Success for these birds is measured one day at a time and the metric is survival. If they have survived by the end of the day they have succeeded and the reward for their work is the chance to enter the contest again the next day. And so it goes until the day they fail.
We humans like to think of ourselves as special and more sophisticated than other forms of life, but how similar is the existence we’ve created to that of the birds at my feeder?
The birds at the feeder present another, darker, metaphor for the aggression and violence that is a hallmark of human behavior, and that is the subject of a video and an essay that I have been thinking about for several months. Coming soon, I hope.
Monte