So your BYFO might offer aesthetic joys and connection with deep cultural roots, but more importantly: can it make you rich and famous? Is this not at the heart of the matter in all human endeavors? Destiny is forever teasing those who pursue careers in the performing arts, or politics, or finance, but you better have talent and/or rich and famous and talented parents. Does the humble BYFO even have a place in this conversation? Is this not a ridiculous notion?
As with so many things, the answer is yes and no. The BYFO at 39 Iffley has certainly provided much useful material for ravinginbeantown at this point, which means it has offered fame of a sort. At last measure, this blogging site’s known audience was up around twenty five, making it less than a viral phenomenon. If that seems meager, perhaps it is; it is also a fact that twenty five people would certainly make for a large crowd in our living room. As for fortune, have you been paying attention to the costs involved? The many 40 pound bags of Pennington black oil sunflower seed @ $36.97? On a material level, one might call this a money pit or drain or whatever, but let’s just say no fortunes are being made, here. If anybody’s getting rich in the avian feeder world, it’s outfits like Duncraft and the rest of the BFIC (bird-feeding industrial complex), because that’s the way things work in this best of all possible worlds.
Brief aside: there is a lovely town south of here with much unexpectedly fine architecture, designed by the famous local architect of the 18th century, Henry Hobson Richardson. The man designed Boston’s Trinity Church along with other well known structures, but unbeknownst to many, he also did five buildings in somewhat-obscure North Easton MA, including the high school and train station. This might seem most curious, until one learns that N Easton was once the home base for Ames shovels, the standard of the world during the California gold rush.
Shortly after John Marshall found flecks of gold in the tailrace of the mill he was building with John Sutter, near present-day Coloma, California, back in 1848, the real fortune turned out to be not so much in “them thar hills” but in all the money spent by those starry-eyed, sweaty fools who thought they were digging their way to riches. Their favorite implement for this, often as not, was an Ames shovel. Astute business people like the Ames family, same as with their capitalist counterparts at Pennington and Duncraft (are those family operations, as well?), are the ones who always make the big dough, in the end. After which they tend to get all generous and philanthropic, which may or may not improve the world but which always enhances their image and brand, never a bad thing. Of course it’s also often a great tax dodge. In the case of Ames, the family generously provided their home town with some great buildings. N Easton is well worth a visit, though the town’s House of Pizza is no great shakes.
Of course, all those losers who never struck it rich by means of gathering enough precious rock cannot really be compared with those finding the many riches available from watching what happens out there at their BYFO every day. The current price of gold runs at about two grand per ounce, my my certainly a lot of money, but great looks at titmice and cardinals and yes even mourning doves and house sparrows or whatever turns up out there, really, every single day, are priceless. It goes without saying. This writer might have his gripes about capitalism and the wealth gap but in the end, things like shovels and bird feeding supplies have their place in the world, where they can lead to great things. The Ames and Duncraft people are nothing like the Sacklers, for instance, who got rich pushing Oxycontin, an addictive drug, or the Krupps selling armaments for 200 years. Sure, you can kill somebody with a shovel or by dropping a 40 pound sack of bird seed on their head, but it’s just not the same.
Still, it’s hard to let go of this fame and fortune thing. Like what if someone with a BYFO made connections with the gambling establishment, and figured out how to employ a bird feeder to appeal to all those pathetic souls driven to wager, whose numbers are greater than anyone would believe? You might’ve thought the introduction of online sports betting was stretching things to the limit, but what about establishing a betting line based on which species are likely to show up at a BYFO on any given day, and in what numbers? Odds at 39 Iffley would be pretty much even for house sparrows and mourning doves, but a potential fortune could be made by putting one’s hard-earned dollars on such birds as red-bellied woodpecker or Carolina wren.
Or what about the Andean condor? You laugh, but given that one lives a half mile away at the Franklin Park Zoo, a clever escapee turning up in our backyard is not out of the question, same with its cellmate (zoo-mate?), the Steller’s sea eagle. An honest to God bonafide wild Steller’s was a recent avian sensation here in the Commonwealth, and the whole story can be found elsewhere on this blog site at Free as a Bird! in the All Natural category. Put your money down and make millions, or even zillions. You feeling lucky today, punk?
Okay, such speculation is all a bit silly, but not silly at all is the success of Ostdrossel, aka Lisa from Detroit, formerly of Deutschland. As you probably know, that means Germany, and Ostdrossel, her domain name, roughly translates as “eastern thrush.” Lisa is the Madonna and Taylor Swift of the BYFO world, as one who has done the important job of spreading her images of birdies chowing down in her suburban Rust Belt backyard all over social media. Go Lisa! A look at some of her visually stunning snaps tells the rest of the story.
To nobody’s surprise, another developing niche market of the BFIC are bird feeder-cams, miniaturized and automated and in some cases even driven by AI, which will ID your birds if you need help and might even inform you of their favorite diet in case the one you’re providing is not to their taste (more Nyjer please!). Most of these generate images similar to those in the Duncraft catalogue, but clever Lisa has created a setup that generates super high-resolution ridiculously close-up images that have deservedly earned her a large following on social media. This evidently includes Bette Midler, who used a few Ostdrossel images on her Twitter feed, by the way, without permission.
In fact, it seems Lisa’s pictures turn up all over the place without permission (he said ironically) but the point is her prodigious output went viral on social media years ago and the fame has not subsided. The woman has an army of fans who alert her when anything gets poached and thus far no lawsuits have resulted, not even when deep-pocketed showbiz stars are involved. Ostdrossel provides the clearest example of how one does not operate a BYFO to get rich, at least by the usual crass measures, and this Mädchen appears to have accepted that with no regrets. Maybe Taylor could give her some tips about how to get fabulously rich, but then again she and Lisa are following very different creative paths, and if the birds had their say who would they favor?
Lisa certainly puts in the effort required for her success. That motion- activated camera, with its very wide-angle lens, snaps up to 7000 images a day, out of which the best shots get selected. It seems like a far cry from traditional photography, but in some ways follows the current trend among avian image-snappers, which is to aim your camera and shoot at many frames-per-second towards your subject, one that might take flight at any moment, and often does. This writer vividly recalls one such photog on a birding trip describe how he’d usually shoot about 1000 images a day and spend the night in the hotel room selecting the best ones. He had nothing on Lisa.
In the case of Ostdrossel, is it even worth pondering the fact that the photographer wasn’t even present when the picture was taken? Or that the “serious” bird photographers with the big lenses often don’t carefully compose-and-shoot anymore, in the grand tradition of photography, but take a more scattershot approach, pulling notable still images from what is essentially a short movie? This lifelong very-old-school photographer finds this all a bit unsettling, but one cannot argue with the results. A look at any number of websites or coffee-table books or Audubon photo contests will offer a lot of gorgeous pictures, and who cares about the process involved?
Wading through tons of images just seems like less fun, is all, and looking at an image taken in the moment, where that moment remains distinct in one’s mind, due to the fact that one was there, is what this photographer prefers. Did he say it seems like a lot less work, as well? Maybe he’s just lazy, and so what? In the end, all there remains to do is to look at the visual results.
The images shot at the 39 Iffley BYFO tend more towards the Duncraft-catalogue aesthetic, but they’re also quite different. None can match the stunning detail and sheer visual drama of Ostdrossel, but many of the Iffley snaps show birds at their animated best in a different way, from a varied perspective that Lisa’s small feeding tray and wide-angle view cannot manage. In the end, it’s all about birds, and all birds are beautiful, not just in the way they look but in the ways they can strike us as silly or angry or serene or even kind of pathetic, at times, and of course this is all in our heads and by no means in theirs. And that goes for whatever shows up out there in the backyard, where even the usual suspects are always special, and we can never be reminded too often of that, don’t you think?
