On Effort

One summer, when I was a child, I went to visit my grandparents. We were sitting around the dinner table, which looked out over their forested backyard, and I saw a bird feeder standing in the middle of it, with a squirrel sitting on it and eating the birdseed as if it was all for him.

"Grandpa, it looks like a squirrel is stealing the birdseed."

He didn't even look. "That he is."

"I wonder if there's anything you can do about it."

"Well, originally, I had a normal bird feeder—the kind that hangs from a tree branch, with a little tray in the bottom that the feed falls into and that the birds can eat from. But the squirrels would just climb down the cord, sit on the perch, and gobble up all the birdseed as if it was theirs.

"So I went to the hardware store and asked the clerk about it. He recommended getting a 'squirrel-proof' bird feeder: the perch is like a scale, and if weight is placed on it, it closes the bird feeder shut. This way, the birds—who are too light to trip the scale—can eat what they want, while the squirrels—who are too heavy—can't get anything. So I went and bought it and installed it. The squirrels couldn't get at the birdseed at first, but it didn't take them long to figure out that if they climbed up under the middle of the bird feeder, clinging there like a bat, and reached their little arms up and over the perch, they could still grab the seed and eat it without tripping the scale.

"So I went back to the hardware store and asked the clerk about it again. This time he recommended putting the bird feeder on a pole, with a wide disc like a frisbee beneath it. The squirrels would be able to climb up the pole, but they wouldn't be able to climb around the frisbee, and so the birdseed would be safe. So I bought it and installed it, and sure enough, the squirrels couldn't get around the frisbee. They just sorta sat and watched the birds eating the seed. The next day, though, I noticed the birdseed was all gone, and the birds wouldn't have eaten it so fast. So I refilled it and watched. The squirrels had learned to take a running leap from the branches way, way above—if they did it just right, they'd land on the birdfeeder, and then be able to eat as much as they liked, just as before.

"So I went back to the hardware store a third time and asked the clerk about it again. He thought about it for a minute and said, 'I'm sorry, mister, but I don't think we can help you. You see, we may be smarter than the squirrels, but we're only trying to spend a few minutes to keep them out; meanwhile, they're spending their entire lives trying to get in!'"