Chickadee Visits the Salad Bar

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Chickadee eyes the watermelon

My husband and I walked into the grocery store on Sunday morning, and while he bought his weekly lottery ticket, I walked toward the deli. I never hang around while the clerk at the service counter tells him that he hasn’t won anything. And I hope if he does win something, it will only be a small comfortable amount, enough to pad the savings account a bit, with some left over for a reasonable amount of fun, like a car trip to Maine instead of a first-class world cruise.

Before shoppers can reach the deli counter, they are tempted by a large oval salad bar, filled with leafy greens, hot and mild peppers, shredded cheeses, tomatoes, sliced eggs, julienned carrots, olives, and loads of other assorted toppings. I never buy anything from the salad bar. It’s expensive, so I slice and dice my own salad goods. Also, while I’m not too worried about germs, I draw the line at eating food that has been sitting in the open, and crammed with serving utensils that have been handled by lots of other people. But I always look at the salad bar because it’s big and strategically placed.

As I neared the salad bar, I spotted a gleeful chickadee pecking at some salad fixings. I thought about the chickadees in my yard who visited the bird feeder and had to eat ordinary black sunflower seeds. I stood and watched the audacious little bird who had invaded the grocery store. I should have been grossed out, but I was amused. Humans take so much wildlife habitat that I had to admire the plucky little fellow who had somehow found his way into a large grocery store and was helping himself to the salad bar without using tongs.

I wasn’t the only human who noticed the black-capped bird enjoying a spread so big he must have felt he had won the lottery. A deli clerk hustled up to the salad bar and tried to shoo the bird away, but chickadees aren’t that intimidated by humans, and he refused to move. The food was too good. The clerk reached for him with both of her hands, and I think she could have managed to cup the feasting bird in her palms. But just as she was about to try, she hesitated and pulled her hands back. She went to the deli and came back with two plastic containers. She tried to capture the bird between the two containers, but at the last moment the bird zipped to the other end of the salad bar and kept eating, after all it was a smorgasbord.

The clerk rounded the counter. “Get away from my salad bar,” she said, waving her hands at the bird who took flight and landed among a gathering of grapes. The grapes were all packaged, so he headed to the tomato stand. When the clerk approached, he decided to check out the watermelon. She followed him, and he took off again. He flew to the meat department and landed at the back of a shelf filled with trays of chicken. Two more clerks arrived and the three of them stood in front of the meat section, discussing how to catch the chickadee. But the little Houdini escaped again. This time he soared to the ceiling, where he could evade capture and have a bird’s-eye view of the store while waiting for a second chance at the salad bar.

My husband and I finished our shopping without seeing the chickadee again. After we paid for our groceries, I turned to head back to the deli. I wanted to ask if they had caught the chickadee. But I stopped. If they had hurt or killed it while trying to catch it, I didn’t want to know. I had been tickled by the little bird who had invaded the grocery store and grazed at the birdfeeder of his dreams. And, I worried the little fellow’s bold adventure would end badly. I felt guilty that I had taken joy from a situation that had put the wee bird in peril.

22 thoughts on “Chickadee Visits the Salad Bar”

  1. Haha, great story! I felt like I was there; I would have rallied for the little one as well. The chickadee definitely hit the jackpot, a double. It feasted on a salad bar and found a reprieve from your Wisconsin winter.

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  3. Poor little thing (kind of LOL). There are birds in our local Walmart sometimes and I don’t know how they get rid of them (I don’t think I want to know). There are birds inside Lowe’s all the time, too, but they can’t get into any real mischief there, I guess. Hope that little guy got out. He has quite a story to tell his friends!

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    • My husband gets bird in the tool and industrial supply warehouse where he works, but they just leave the big overhead door open for a while and the birds find their way out. Nothing good to eat in his warehouse.

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  7. I can’ t blame the little guy. I remember how cold it gets up your way. But the poor clerks.

    Some years ago, my husband tried to grow tomatoes in the backyard. They did well enough, but he gave up after finding various critter bite marks in each and every one of them. The critters were sampling. Yep. we were feeding to local crop of squirrels? possums? who knows.

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      • It doesn’t take long, does it? A friend of mine stationed her dog on the back porch so she’s bark at the raccoons raiding her fruit trees, at which point she’d come out and turn the hose on the raccoons. She could easily lose a whole crop to the raiders.

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  8. LOL repeatedly. WoW! You go little bird. I lso like your musings before the bird about lottery fail, salad ideas, germs on utensils and then the joy of that busy winged insouciance. Yeah!

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    • The next Sunday I tried to find out what happened to it, but the person in the deli didn’t want to seem to talk about it. Maybe they didn’t want customers hearing about it. I hope the chickadee made it out okay!

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