My Everlasting Bird Feeder

By G. E. Shuman

My family and I do something that is becoming increasingly politically incorrect. We buy bottled water. In fact, we buy a lot of individually bottled waters, in case packs. (Please don’t have us arrested.) The kids take bottled water to basketball practice nearly every day, and we happen to like the convenience of that. Besides, people are supposed to drink a lot of water, which we do. Only a few years ago buying bottled water, and more recently, buying flavored bottled water was what everybody did. Now it is considered an anti-environment act. Many people also feel that drinking water from a plastic bottle is dangerous to your health. Where were those people when we started doing it? In our defense, we at our home have probably never been on the cutting edge of the newest fad or enlightened behavior, so perhaps we may be excused for continuing to buy bottled water a while longer.

A few evenings ago I saw an ad on TV for a new product. The ad was for a reusable, earth-friendly, metal personal beverage container. It had a screw on cap, but other than that reminded me a lot of something we used to call a cup. The idea is to fill the container from your kitchen faucet and save all that plastic from ending up in the landfill. What will they think of next? The ad even mentioned that recycling was only a bit better end for plastic than the landfill, as the air is polluted in the recycling process. The ad also attempted to take me on a guilt trip, when it stated that a plastic bottle dumped in a landfill will stay there for eight hundred years. Well, in response to that statement I have two questions. The first one is this. If plastic stays in the landfill for eight hundred years, where does it go then? I wonder if someone were to watch one of my plastic water bottles in the landfill for those eight hundred years, what would happen the following day? Would my bottle go ‘poof’ and then be gone? (That is more than two questions, I know. But it was really one main question and some sub-questions after that.) My second main question is this. How do they know that my plastic bottle will last eight hundred years? There was no plastic eight hundred years ago, so no bottles from that time are going ‘poof’ and disappearing from the landfill today. In some ways I wish plastic had been invented hundreds of years ago. If it had, I could own a personal beverage container once belonging to Christopher Columbus. I could still be using it today and for the next three hundred years or so, if only people lasted as long as plastic.

A few days after seeing the guilt-inflicting ad for that new cup, I began thinking of other things we buy that come in plastic containers. Milk is an obvious one. Another is Hawaiian Punch. My son loves that stuff, and it comes in huge, square-ish clear plastic jugs, each having a big plastic handle at the top to carry and pour it with. When I was young there was Hawaiian Punch, (I’m not kidding.) but back then it came in metal cans you opened with an old fashioned can opener. Those cans have been recycled for years. I think they used to melt them down and make Buicks out of them. That speeds up the corrosion process considerably, and the metal goes back to nature by the time the car is paid for. It was sort of a Hawaiian Punch circle of life. Anyway, I decided to find a use for that big plastic punch jug. It looked exactly like new, and had at least seven hundred ninety nine years, eleven months and a dozen days left in its lifetime. So, I rinsed it out, put the cap back on, and made a small hole, on one side, near the bottom. I then made another small hole on the opposite side, in the same area. Then I got about a foot long stick and pushed it into the first hole and an inch or so out through the back hole. Next I cut about a three inch circular hole just above the first hole, and there I had it. I had just constructed a practically everlasting bird feeder. All that was left was to put some wild bird food in it, and hang it in a tree by that nifty plastic handle on the top.

I’ve been thinking that, just maybe, someone a hundred years from now will find my bird feeder still in that tree. If so, the tree will be very old indeed. Perhaps they can take it down and transfer it to another, younger tree. After all, the feeder will still have a good seven hundred years of use left.

Or, perhaps people a hundred years from now will collect antiques made of plastic, from our time. So maybe they wouldn’t put the feeder up in another tree. Someone might simply display it alongside a funny, bulky communication device their Grandpa called a cell phone, and other valuable old things like pens and pocket combs. One of those things could have been Columbus’ own personal beverage container. It would still have about two hundred years of use left in it… if only Columbus had plastic.