It all started when Christopher spotted a yellow warbler. At first he thought it was a goldfinch, a pretty enough bird. However, the chest was streaked with brown and the wings and tail were gray rather than black and white. The Kitchen Table Bird Book says that many people mistakenly identify yellow warblers as goldfinches, or even as canaries, and that they are, in fact, sweet and gentle little birds. Author John Ham goes on to say: "Cowbirds are famous for depositing one of their eggs in a yellow warbler nest, and after hatching such an egg the tiny yellow parents drive themselves crazy trying to feed what they believe is an oversize warbler baby."

We have cowbirds. They were among the first to arrive after we started feeding regularly in our yard. This isn't surprising since, according to Birds of Michigan, there are no longer any areas in the continental U.S. which are free of cowbirds. The cowbirds are thus named because they hang around cattle, and have even been known to ride on cows' backs. My mother has a framed photograph of four cowbirds standing on an Appoloosa pony. Back when the eastern part of our country was largely forested, cowbirds used to follow the Buffalo herds across the west, and a cowbird was fairly rare on this side of the Mississippi. But deforestation by humans has made nearly every place the perfect cowbird habitat.

There's nothing inherently wrong with a free-wheeling life of riding around on the backs of cows or following buffalo across state lines, except that it leaves little time for tending a nest. So the clever cowbird has discovered the convenience of using the nests of other birds. If it is one of those mornings in May, June, or July when the female gets the urge to lay an egg, she will search out the nest of a smaller bird, such as the yellow warbler or the chipping sparrow or the red eyed vireo, and she will lay an egg therein. And to make sure that her offspring is not neglected, and also to leave the nest with the same number of eggs, she will puncture one of the nest-builder's own eggs with her beak, lift it out of the nest, and let it fall to the ground.

This scenario need not be taken on faith; the Kalamazoo nature center has a video available at the punch of a button which exposes one particular female cowbird's exploits in the nest of one particular vireo. The rest of the nest builder's eggs may hatch, but the cowbird fledglings, which are larger and grow more quickly than the nest-builder's babies, will crush the latter or will throw them out of the nest to cut down on the competition for parental attention. When the cowbirds are grown, they depart to open areas where they find other cowbirds to hang with.

So how, Christopher wonders, is one to protect one's rarer bird species from predation by the hale and hearty cowbird? Essays addressing the cowbird problem mention that in particularly threatened areas bird-lovers "trap" cowbirds. But it is left unclear what one does with these "trapped" birds. To set cowbirds free into any wild area would be to theaten that new area. No mention is made about killing the trapped birds, perhaps because such admissions would upset the sizable contingent of non-violent, inflict-no-harm sorts who pay generous dues to the Audubon Society and other wildlife protection agencies. Some animal lovers do protest this quiet killing of cowbirds, pointing out that cowbirds, not being moral agents, can't be held responsible for their actions, which after all are the result of human devastation of natural environments.

Christopher suggests he might start shooting cowbirds. In the hunting department at Meijer's Thrifty Acres, he picks up a color pamphlet called Michigan Hunting and Trapping Guide, the cover of which features four inset photos of men pointing guns while children watch. The phamphlet says to call the Michigan Department of Natural Resources (DNR) if one has any questions. Though killing native non-game birds is illegal, according to this phamphlet, Christopher notices a section titled, "Damage and Nuisance Animal Control Permits." He calls and asks if he can get such a permit for killing cowbirds.

It is illegal to shoot migratory American song birds, of which the brown-headed cowbird is more or less one. If you are inclined to shoot small, defenseless birds, you are within your legal rights to snuff out English sparrows and starlings, who are not only nuisance birds but illegal immigrants as well. (English sparrows are also called house sparrows, though they are not sparrows at all but weaver finches.) Both the starling and the English sparrow, according to John Ham in Kitchen Table, were brought to America in the last century and released in Central Park by the "misguided bird lover," Eugene Scheifflin, who wanted to have in America all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare's plays. With no natural predators, these birds have thrived, sometimes at the expense of native species.

The DNR gal gives Christopher the phone number of Doug Parr at a federal office. While under normal circumstances it would be entirely illegal to shoot songbirds, Parr tells Christopher, there is an exception for certain birds--cowbirds, red-winged blackbirds, grackles and crows--"if they are committing or are about to commit depredations." (If you want to shoot crows without any good reason, you have to do so in February, March, or September, which is crow hunting season in Michigan.)

So if Christopher actually witnesses a female cowbird descending into a nest and laying an egg, he will be completely within his rights to shoot her for committing this depredation. But he is unlikely to witness such an event, outside the nature center video, considering that he has to sleep, go to work, and fix my car, so we're stuck at "intent to commit depredations." It's difficult to know the intentions of a bird, says Christopher, but he thinks it is pretty likely that during May, June, and July, the males are thinking about fertilizing the females, who in turn are thinking about laying eggs in somebody else's nest. Due to this inclination of the species, Christopher thinks that he is within his legal rights to blow a few of them away.

Though we have a small stand of woods and though there is a meadow across the road, we do not live in the country, and our neighbor George G. was fined two hundred dollars for discharging a firearm too close to his own house last year. The Township office told Christopher that, no, he could not fire a rifle of any kind around here. But a bee-bee gun? Sure. Christopher has stretched the definition of bee-bee gun to include a twenty-two calibre pellet airgun, which he then purchased.

And with no more than a rapid succession of pumps, Christopher, the kind-hearted boy I brought here from Boston, lover of fluffy kittens and pretty birds, has become a hunter. Sometimes when I'm taking out the trash or weeding the flower beds, I glance across the road and see him lurking among the small willows and overgrown honeysuckle bushes. I wave to him and he puts his fingers to his lips. Sometimes he makes bird sounds, imitating the metallic gurgle of the cowbirds in order to attract them or imitating a crow's caw in order to shoo away starlings. If I take the mail out to the box, I sometimes hear a "psst," and there is Christopher behind the privet hedge, pointing with the end of his gun at an irradescent indigo bunting in the lilac tree. In a 1996 study, Bill Strausberger from University of Illinois reported that out of twenty-six indigo bunting nests in a Chicago-area preserve, only three baby indigo buntings survived the parasiticism of the local cowbirds.

The other day I went out to the driveway to get something from my car, but my car wasn't there. I turned around to find Chris at the picnic table, with my dog Re-bar sitting beside him. Chris was petting Re-bar's head, or perhaps he was holding Re-bar in place. The binoculars and gun lay on the table.

"I'm trying to teach Re-bar to hunt," he says.

Re-bar looks up at me with a guilty expression.

"Tell him to stay," says Chris.

"Stay." I say. "Where's my car?"

"It was in my line of sight." He points it out, parked down the road a ways. Re-bar watches me go to my car and then, across Christopher's line of sight, back toward the house. Re-bar would like to come inside with me. He has no particular interest in cowbirds, although he gets excited when Christopher fires the gun.

"I had a female in my sites, but I shot and missed her," Christopher tells me. "I'm waiting for her to come back."

The female cowbird is well-camoulflaged, fawn-gray in color, a somewhat plain, but not unattractive bird, easy to mistake on the shady ground for a female red-winged blackbird, or in the treetops for a catbird. The males are more distinctive with their black leather jacket bodies and brown shiny heads. Though the females need not tend young, they are kept busy scoping out nests and laying all those eggs--one cowbird in captivity laid seventy-seven eggs in a season, according to a nature center publication. The males have only the job of inseminating the females, and perhaps this lack of employment is why they hang around in gangs of five or six, with maybe one young female among them. They descend in a clatter onto the hickory log where we spread seed.

Christopher has killed seven cowbirds so far, but who knows if all this killing is doing any good? Female cowbirds travel as far as seven kilometers to distribute their eggs, and they're up and around at five a.m., while Christopher is still only dreaming of their depredations.

Christopher brought one fresh male corpse into the house and held it up by a clawed foot. He made Re- bar sniff the cowbird. "This is what you should fetch."

"Get that out of here," I say.

"I want you to see it," he says.

I follow him outside where he lays the dead bird out on a chunk of unsplit firewood. The cowbird really is an attractive bird, an icterid, as glossy black as a little crow, but with a bronze head. John Ham calls cowbirds "strongly built and agressive." Up close, I notice something reptilian about the bird, perhaps because of the thick neck. Christopher thinks their slightly primitive look may be related to their short incubation period, which helps them compete against the babies of other species. Audubon shot birds, stuffed them, and used them as models for his exquisite paintings, but the sight of this one dead bird, permanently grounded, is heartbreaking. The wings fan out easily when Christopher extends them, the muscle supple before rigor mortis set in.

"I don't like shooting them, you know," says Christopher. But he sees it as his duty to the other birds, say, the Kirtland warblers, whose numbers are dwindling in Michigan as a result of the cowbirds' brood parasiticism. He buries the cowbird body near the compost heap.

While stalking the cowbirds, Christopher discovered a couple of flickers chipping a nest out of a dead tree, twenty feet up. Cowbirds tend not to parasitize cavernous nests such as those flickers and woodpeckers build. Because of our many dead trees, we have lots of woodpeckers--hairy, downy, red- bellied and red-headed. In the winter, I go to the butcher and buy suet for them, as well as for the titmice, chickadees, and nuthatches. The suet they prefer is from the belly of the cows and often has bits of kidney and other organs stuck to it. I usually have Re-bar in the back seat when I pull in the driveway of Galesburg Meat Locker, and he brightens right up in the vicinity of so much blood. A guy in a red- smeared frock hands me the hunk of fat loose in a paper bag. At home I slice a piece off with a heavy knife, wrap it in hardware cloth so the squirrels can't get to it, then hang it from a nail on a tree in front of the house. In the summer woodpeckers eat insects.

While I am checking the dog for ticks, Christopher comes in and hangs up his gun. "Life isn't sacred," he says. "We may put spiders outside, but we squash mosquitos. We eat meat." And hawks eat sparrows, and crows eat owlets, and owls eat crowlets. And I kill ticks.

"I think of it as weeding the garden," he says. "We can have warblers and indigo buntings or we can just have cowbirds." Christopher perhaps uses this analogy with me because I am constantly at battle with certain weeds and groundcovers which try to take over our front yard garden. Lately, after working in the garden, I've found ticks on myself, as well as on the dog. I run my fingers through my hair and wonder aloud if the cowbirds were previously eating the ticks, if maybe by killing the cowbirds we're causing a plague of ticks. Christopher says no, everybody has more ticks this year. But I have to wonder if the disappearance of cowbirds locally could have some kind of unexpected results? Certainly Shakespeare-lover Eugene Scheifflin had no idea what disastrous results his actions would have; he meant well bringing those English birds to the new world.

"You should shoot a cowbird yourself," Christopher suggests. But it seems impractical. I would have to learn to load and shoot the gun, then practice shooting at targets, and then I would have to neglect some other work in order to make time for lurking. And shooting the cowbirds myself would imply another level of commitment to this venture, the way butchering your own beef adds a whole new dimension to eating hamburgers: while some might find their meat-eating experience enriched, others become vegetarians.

The cowbird massacre may be having the intended result. This week Christopher has seen baby chipping sparrows, and I saw, for the first time ever, an indigo bunting chick. But this morning, at seven a.m., an adolescent cowbird walked right up to our front door. A clumsy, thick-necked, bright-eyed fellow with uncertain dark coloring, he was out poking around in the world for probably the first time. I knew his history--he was the step-child who starved and crushed his smaller siblings in the nest, perhaps siblings who would have been the next generation of sweet-singing yellow warblers. He had screamed for food beyond the means of his tiny step-parents, who may have even died of exhaustion at feeding him. While Christopher slept, the little cowbird, investigated our sidewalk and lawn, tapping the ground with his beak and looking around for others of his kind. Fresh from the ruined nest, he was not sure yet where to go or how to live.

Recent news in brief

Writing news: Pick up the latest (July/August 1998) issue of Utne Reader and you will find my essay "Selling Manure" reprinted therein.

Visitors: Anne Sjostrom visited from Australia and Colorado. She is staying currently with family in Colorado. She was the ideal houseguest, not only doing all the dishes all the time, but also hooking up our telephone into the new addition, re-covering three chairs and making good conversation all the while. Upon the heels of her visit, Derek Vann arrived dressed all in leather on a motorcycle. He told about his bicycle tours to Albania and Eritrea. Christopher treated him to generous glasses one of his weirder beers, cinnamon stout, and I went to bed at 1:00. Derek left the next morning to visit Pat Kellermann near Bad Axe, Michigan on his way to London, Ontario.

Laleli L. Lopez sent a post card from Lisboa, Portugal, where she says she was "calma ou relaxa".

Sam Thompson on the incident at the tap room: "One rowdy Saturday night I drank two pitchers by myself. Then this black guy came in, and I said to him, "This is not a safe place for people of color--why are you here?" I then had six bikers telling me to shut my old face up, so I figured it was time to go home. I have not been back there since. All that I can offer in explanation is that I was concerned for the guy's safety, but it got twisted which is not uncommon in Comstock--and it also may have been just a bit racist on my part to be thinking that he was not safe in the Tap Room. Hell, no one is safe in the tap room!