A marine animal caught unintentionally by commercial fishing gear is known as bycatch. Dolphins trapped in nets targeting tuna, sea turtles swept up in shrimp trawls and terrapins caught in crab traps are bycatch. Inland, gray squirrels at a bird feeder are also bycatch, as are other visitors.

I scatter sunflower seeds for our avian ground feeders, which this year include dozens of robins. During heavy rain they sensibly shelter in trees and bushes. But one critter’s sensible is another’s opportunity. From the porch I watched as a fat possum in the pouring rain gobbled up sunflower seeds mixed in with mud and grass. For 20 minutes this big dumb marsupial mushed around in the sloppy ground, probably mumbling in possum-speak something like, “Better to be wet and well fed than dry and hungry.” Maybe not so dumb after all.

We have such an abundance of squirrels that sometimes they seem like the target species; the birds, bycatch. We have a plethora of these gatecrashers, in part, because our neighbors also feed squirrels while trying to attract birds. I feel certain that on days when I forget to put out birdseed, the squirrels hightail it across the street to feeders there. As we are all aware, squirrels think roads are built to make it easy for them to cross from point A to point B, without considering that cars also use these pathways. The result is roadkill. 

One time our across-the-street neighbor and I stood in our respective front yards and gawked at a bird we had inadvertently attracted. It was, in a way, second-order bycatch. As we watched, the gigantic turkey vulture landed in the road between us and began dining on road-killed, birdseed-fed gray squirrel. Our collective bird feeders had attracted the squirrel that had now attracted the scavenger.

We watched in fascination when a car approached and the vulture flew into a tree to let it pass. Much smarter than a squirrel. I picked up the dead squirrel and tossed it out of the street into our driveway. The clever scavenger soon returned and safely finished his meal. Fortunately, we were not trying to sell our house. Imagine prospective buyers showing up when a vulture is having a snack in your front yard.

I once witnessed another, more dramatic, bycatch phenomenon. When bird feeders attract songbirds day after day, aerial predators often take notice as well. So it is with sharp-shinned hawks, which qualify as bycatch. I was standing outside when a small blur of bright red passed by my shoulder, followed a millisecond later by a larger streak of brown. Both moved bullet-fast: a sharp-shinned hawk in pursuit of a male cardinal. The pair made two complete circuits around a big wax myrtle bush. The hawk was a foot behind its intended prey, and I was a foot away from both, when the cardinal wheeled abruptly into the center of the bush. Deflected by the bush’s branches, the hawk came to rest on a pine limb 30 feet away.

Like a gangster in an alley with his arms crossed and his gun tucked under his arm, the hawk stared at the bird in the bush. Inside the metaphorical drugstore where the quarry had taken refuge, the cardinal waited for his chance to escape. For 10 minutes predator and prey sat silent and unmoving, as did I. Then the cardinal made his break and quickly reached the safety of a thick clump of bushes. In a moment, the hawk holstered his gun and headed off. The feathers of a sparrow I found on the ground later in the day suggested that one small fowl had not fared as well as the cardinal had.    Gray squirrels notwithstanding, bird feeder bycatch can sometimes be more entertaining than the birds.

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