Semiosphere of backyard birding

We have surrounded the house—thankfully surrounded by mature sugar maple, elm, mulberry, fir, birch, and Norway spruce trees—with bird houses and bird feeders; the latter of which, as any bird feeder knows, is also seconded to the squirrels, lots of fox squirrels and a few red squirrels. I spent the money last year to get one big feeder equipped with a squirrel baffle, which works very well, but we came to a kind of truce, the squirrels and us, in that they feed around a few obstacles and occasionally suffer the harassment of passing dogs and we buy extra (sunflower) oil seed, the only thing we use in the feeders, except suet—which keeps the four different kinds of woodpecker (downy, hairy, red-breasted, and flicker) happy. Chipmunks, like the doves who are too fat to perch on the feeders, feed on what falls to the ground. We get seasonal birds—always looking for that passing rose-breasted grosbeak, always associating the arrival of juncos that summer in the Upper Peninsula with the arrival of frost and snow.

Last Spring, I bought lumber and studied YouTube videos in order to build a deck in the back yard, where we have three cage feeders and one suet feeder, one bird house, and a shade garden. Now, on a nice day like today, one can sit quietly on the deck, and within minutes there is all sorts of visible animal activity. A few minutes ago, I looked out from the kitchen window and counted five fox squirrels, a nuthatch, three house finches, and a hairy woodpecker. Recently, we’d take a week to camp and fish in the Upper Peninsula, and the feeders ran dry. Some days ago, I went around a filled the feeders. It was around forty minutes before the first sparrow showed up. Within two hours, the place was again boiling with activity.

Some of them are very brave. A one-eyed goldfinch landed on me once out there, his handicap causing him to mistake me for something less animate. But the chickadees will come and take a seed out of the feeder almost with your hand on it sometimes. Downies will let you get within a couple of steps, less if you are obviously just passing. It’s like they are each surrounded with their own force fields. And they have an apparent means by which a certain number of squirrels and a certain number of birds can be content to forage for fallen seed within a fairly predictable circumference. And you begin to see it, that there are in fact force fields of a sort in operation; that is, these creatures, including the trees and bushes and ground cover and soil, are all in a dance we can call a semiosphere.

Every thing (material constitution) is, by being constituted in a particular way, aware in a particular way. But awareness is not purely some kind of Umwelt, or “self-centered world”; each Umwelt involves signs and countersigns that reach out to and bring back from other beings (ht to Jakob von Uexküll and Thomas Sebeok), a semiosphere that is the self-regulation of these exchanges.