When I was a boy, I thought the way for me to trap birds was to get a box, turn it upside down and support it with a stick pressing against the front edge of the box on the one end and supported by the ground on the other end. I would tie a string around the stick and put bread crumbs under the box and hide behind some bushes. I had to wait hours for birds to come, but they did and when they went into the box, just as they were enjoying their free meal I pulled the string. The box would fall down and some birds would be trapped inside. I had reason to catch birds. I liked blue jays, but they were eating up all the figs on our fig trees. My dad said to use my BB gun and kill as many blue jays as I could, but I had rather trap them and put them in a big cage so I could study them. That is why I made my first bird trap.

All birds are not sweet canaries; some are outright pests. Blue jays destroy fig trees, some destroy crops. Crows make a raucous noise irritating to many. Flocks of birds clog the engines of airplanes and cause them to crash. Birds can be a nuisance. Birds can be dangerous. Hitchcock had it right. To counter bird’s negative effect many have turned to technology for a solution. There are nets available to keep birds from landing in unwanted areas. There are sound devices for frightening the birds; there is also electric shock. Of course there has been quite an advance in the design of bird traps since I made my own using a manually operated string. Even as a boy I knew there had to be a better way to make a makeshift bird trap than the one I had designed. I found verification when I traveled to Mississippi with my mother to visit my country cousins. They showed me how to make a workable homemade bird trap. The first thing my cousins pointed out is that I had to wait, hiding behind a bush, holding a string and I had to wait for hours. What I needed was some kind of mechanism that would act as a trigger whenever birds entered the trap. My cousin showed me how to design such a trigger.

The trigger is the very heart of the bird trap. It consists of three pieces. There is the upright slat that supports the trap from the ground up, except that the top end of the stick does not rest on the trap itself, but on a second piece whose edge rests on and supports the trap. There is one final piece that is long and close to the ground. It fits into the side of the upright piece. When the bird touches this piece the trigger springs and the box collapses. No string needed. The trigger is not the only improvement on the makeshift trap. The box itself can be improved. I prefer to use the slats from apple boxes. The slats are used to build up a pyramid. The pyramid is useful, for it provides nearly a full view of the birds inside. To retrieve the bird one digs a hole on the side of the pyramid so that you can slip your hand inside the pyramid. If you are going after a blue jay, you had better wear a heavy set of gloves because the blue thing will take a hunk out of your hand. I have to confess that I would keep the birds for a couple days and then release them. I figured they would come right back and I could catch them again. There is one common factor that runs through both commercial bird traps and the home variety. None of them work very well. The birds figure out how to circumvent the system and they keep coming back. This was the case when I first used my BB gun to rid the blue jays from our fig trees. But I could not rid them. No matter how many I killed, they kept coming back. It seems the same result is obtained from commercial equipment also. Witness the recent water landing on the Hudson, the downed flight caused by birds congesting the engines. And yet we keep trying. What began as the innocent explorations of a child has grown into a multimillion dollar business. Hence the power of the bird trap.