A Supremely Bad Idea by Luke Dempsey

Author:Luke Dempsey
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781608196685
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

NOW WHAT?

A friend of mine got an e-mail from a friend of hers, a guy called Ted Olinger. Ted lives in the Pacific Northwest, and has a problem with woodpeckers, specifically, northern flickers. The problem is this: they drum on the roof of his house, every day, all day long. A study in the late 1950s described the sound as akin to that of a “miniature pneumatic drill.” That sound is beginning to drive Ted Olinger nuts.

The original e-mail eventually makes its way to my in-box. Now that I’m known as a birder, I get notes like this forwarded to me all the time. The subject lines of too many of my work e-mails say things like, “Prospect Park and birder harassment,” or “Ivory-bill,” or most regularly the simple, “Fwd: Birds.” If this was England, where “birds” can be a synonym for “gentle lady folk,” I might get a call from human resources. Here, I’m just thought of as mildly odd, the work colleague who has binoculars on his windowsill and a picture of an eastern meadowlark on his wall. A lot of the e-mails about birds I read and delete, given that they’re actually about birds and not women; but the one from Ted I saved, given that his annoyance at the flickers was real, and gentle, and intriguing. I could tell he loved the woodpeckers, but he had a real problem too: it’s hard enough to get a four-year-old boy to sleep past six A.M. as it is, but when a family of flickers are pretending to be the Warrior Drums of Burundi, well, then you have to find a solution.

Beth, his wife, is a bit more enamored of them. According to Ted’s e-mail, she’s been known to crouch in her son’s treehouse and watch the parents and their brood of three chicks. The solution, such as it is, is that Ted has nailed a bird house to one of the firs in the garden, to try and get the flickers to leave the roof alone. All this seems to have done is encourage a pileated woodpecker, a bird many times bigger than a flicker, to drum on the fir while the flickers drum on the house.

As if all this weren’t enough, there’s one more elephant in the room, up there in Pierce County, Washington. For all the pounding on roofs and firs, what all the birds actually love most is to drum on something else entirely. Ted, in his e-mail, mentions that his yard boasts, in Beth’s words, “the most expensive bird roost in the western hemisphere.” This is now her mantra, he says.

What could it be? I e-mailed Ted directly about the flickers, and he e-mailed me back, and I e-mailed him again, subtly mentioning the “expensive bird roost,” and he e-mailed me back without clarifying. Now I just had to know, and was relieved when the Olingers invited me to come see them and their raucous garden.

I couldn’t wait. It had been months since Michigan,

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