Playing The Pitiful Card

Day 349: If ever there were experts at playing the "pitiful" card, Grey Jays would take the prize. Their call is a plaintive mew, not unlike that of a very young kitten, and they understand the power of eye contact, shifting their glance from your trail snacks to your own eyes in obvious interspecies communication. Don't tell me I'm anthropomorphizing. I've studied the corvids and I've lived with psittacines. The term "bird brain" should be considered a compliment. They understand stimulus and response, the "stimulus" being their heart-rending begging and the "response" that you share your lunch with them. If you analyze that closely, it's a bit more sophisticated than pecking a green button to get a treat from a laboratory dispenser. They know how to work an audience.

The issues involved in feeding wild birds are complex, and humans aren't really the brightest crayons in the box when it comes to understanding anything more complicated than "Do this" and "Don't do that." The average hiker sees no difference between giving a Grey Jay a graham cracker and giving it a few raw unsalted sunflower seeds. The reward for the human is the same: Jay sits on your hand or your head, and you get to take a picture to share on Facebook. The Jay, on the other hand, gets a mouthful of chemicals, sugar and processed grain in the case of the graham cracker, or something not too far removed from its normal diet which is digestible and nutritious from the sunflower seeds. I am not against feeding wild birds outside the Park; I am against feeding them the wrong foods. That said, I speak out against the practice in general because humans are largely ineducable on the finer points. But no, the Sheep Lake lot didn't talk me out of my figs.