The Business of Birdfeeders

In an earlier post, I wrote about my amazement with the array of colorful birds that live in our neighborhood and come to our bird feeder each day. I suppose I must sound quite bumptious to someone who grew up here, but you have to remember that in Los Angeles what you mostly see are pigeons, seagulls, and crows. Growing up in the Santa Monica Mountains we also had mockingbirds and scrub jays, and occasionally a Great Horned owl would perch in the tree outside my window and hoot for a few nights, and at our house in Redondo Beach we were frequently inundated with house sparrows (too many to count), but that’s basically it. And you might go weeks or months at a time without seeing any birds except for the ubiquitous crows and pigeons…

Meanwhile, in the month or so I’ve been watching, I’ve seen wild geese, mallard ducks, Great Blue herons, snowy egrets, American goldfinches, cardinals, robins, chickadees, more house sparrows than you can possibly count, red-tailed hawks, house finches, red-winged blackbirds, and blue jays. Not to mention crows, pigeons (and rock doves), and seagulls, for that matter. And that’s just wandering around Greater Lansing; I can’t even imagine how many more I’ll get to add to my list when we take a trip up to Northern Michigan and the Upper Peninsula. Or how many more birds will pass through our neighborhood during the Fall and Spring migrations…

So a few days ago we went out and bought a bird feeder to put on the feeder station attached to our deck (it came with the house). It seemed like a good idea, since I like watching the birds, and we already had a place to hang a feeder, and there was a store just up the street that sells birdfeeders and associated apparatus, called Wild Birds Unlimited. So we went, and discovered that there is a lot more to feeding birds than meets the eye. To begin with, there are over 300 of these Wild Birds Unlimited stores in North America, including one located less than five miles from our old place in Redondo. The things you find out when you relocate two-thirds of the way across a continent…

Then there’s the fact that these stores carry dozens of different types of feeders, including trough feeders, tube feeders, finch feeders, hummingbird and oriole feeders, hopper feeders, tray feeders, window feeders, suet feeders, specialty feeders, and feeders rather optimistically described as “squirrel-proof.” Then there are “instant” feeders – essentially balls of seeds or other popular bird feed held together with peanut butter or other edible binding agents, which you can hang in a tree or stick to a fencepost, and “bark butter” which is essentially the same product in tub form, which you can spread onto a tree branch or a fence post, presumably with a putty knife…

Equally bewildering is the array of bird feeds themselves, including dozens of different types. These are important, as the clerk at our local Wild Birds Unlimited explained, because different birds have different favorite foods and different dietary needs. We selected a bag of “Supreme Blend” bird food, which includes favorites for cardinals, finches, and chickadees, and also peanuts for the robins and seeds for the sparrows. The blue jays aren’t much of a bother; they will apparently eat anything that doesn’t eat them first, including the eggs and young of other birds. We also selected a classic balcony-style feeder with a gravity-feed system, because the cardinals prefer this type of feeder, and most of the smaller birds don’t really mind it (again, the jays don’t care)…

“Why does he tell me this?” I hear some of you asking. It’s simple, really: a month ago I had no idea there was such a thing as a national chain of retail stores dedicated to feeding birds; today I have a club card that will give me 15% off on all future bird food purchases. What new business models will I stumble upon tomorrow? More to the point, what new business models might there be waiting just outside your window?