EVEN A GENIUS CAN GET ONLY SO FAR AHEAD OF THEM
by Daniel Suits
East Lansing Towne Courier - August 31, 2003

My father was a great one for finding ingenious solutions to problems. Long before TV remotes came equipped with mute buttons – in fact, long before TV sets even had such things as remote controls – Dad devised a mute by the simple expedient of soldering a ten foot section of lamp cord between the speaker and its input. A switch in his hand controlled the sound: switch on, sound; switch off, mute.

Dorothy Suits with the lemon tree on the left

He also took great pride in a large lemon plant my grandmother had sprouted many years before from a sprig of lemon blossom taken from a bridal bouquet. Dad gave it a drib of water at the same time every day. This was fine while he was home, but how water the plant when he and my motherwanted to travel? He solved the problem by connecting some copper tubing to the coldwater line in the basement and equipping it with a valve and timer. He led the tubing up through a hole bored in the floor next to the lemon plant and arched it neatly over the edge of the pot. The timer was set to deliver a carefully measured dollop of water every day at exactly the right time. I remember when the folks came to visit, Dad would sometimes pull out his watch in the afternoon and announce, "Ah, my lemon plant is being watered."

But I think the device in which he took the greatest pride was his bird feeder. Dad was an enthusiastic birdwatcher and wanted to maintain a feeder. There are plenty of commercial feeders to install out in the yard, but he wanted one that would bring the birds closer. In addition, he wanted to conserve birdseed: he saw no point in letting the birds eat up his seed when he wasn’t there to see them.

View of the Electrified Bird Feeder The copper strips carry the voltage

His first attempt was to rig a platform outside his study window on which he could set a wooden tray containing the birdseed. When he came into his study, he would open the window, set out the tray, close the window and watch the birds feed as he studied or worked. As far as it went, this was a fine arrangement. Dad even found a way to announce that dinner was served by wiggling the window sash as he lowered it after setting out the tray. This made a little bumping sound that the waiting birds soon learned to recognize as a dinner bell.

Unfortunately, a large flock of hungry English sparrows began to respond to the dinner bell so enthusiastically and in such numbers that they wolfed down several times more of Dad’s birdseed than the songbirds did. This not only made the feeder an expensive proposition, but it also meant that he had to get up often to refill the tray.

Dad set about figuring a way to discourage the sparrows. His first idea involved a trip to the local music store to buy a big bass drumstick. He drilled a hole in the stick, and swung it on a kind of axel mounted on the interior windowsill. A string from the end of the drumstick led to his chair. When sparrows took over the feeder, a jerk on the string bumped the drumstick against the window glass, and the startled sparrows fled.

At least they did the first few times. It wasn’t long, however, before they discovered that a bump on the glass was really nothing to fear. It was only noise, with no consequences. After that, their response to the bump was merely to fly up and hover briefly just a few feet

above the tray, immediately to settle back down and resume feeding. An additional problem with the drumstick was that the bump also frightened away any songbirds that had managed to wedge themselves in among the sparrows.

Clearly something was needed that would give the sparrows something to really fear, but which would not disturb the songbirds. Dad’s solution was to install a grid of alternate copper strips to the bottom of the feeding tray, and to wire the grid to an automobile spark coil appropriately transformed and plugged into the house current. A line to a push button on the arm of his rocking chair enabled Dad to deliver a mild electric spark shock to any birds he wanted to discourage.

This device worked like a charm. It took only two or three jolts for the sparrows to learn that the feeding tray wasn’t a safe place to be, and in their absence, songbirds flocked to the seed.

But the sparrows, it turned out, had one more string to their bow. Most of the larger songbirds would harass any sparrows that appeared while they were feeding, but the beautiful red cardinal, Dad’s favorite bird, paid no attention to them. The sparrows discovered that the feeding tray, otherwise a dangerous place, was perfectly safe as long as a cardinal was feeding there. So the flock of sparrows merely perched in the neighboring trees and waited. As soon as a cardinal landed on the feeder, down came the sparrows to gobble up seed as fast as they could. When that cardinal departed, the sparrows fled back to the trees.

Dad used that electrified feeder for years, but wrack his brains as he could, he never devised a way to correct that last defect. He finally admitted that the sparrows were just too smart for him. "Whoever thinks that ‘birdbrain’ means ‘stupid’," he used to say, "never had to contend with English sparrows."