Ninety Percent of the Questions Are About Squirrels

The store opens at 9:17.

Not 9:15. Not 9:30. Nine seventeen, Monday through Saturday, and it closes at 5:11. Sunday it opens at 10:13 and closes at 5:03. Those are the posted hours, not a typo anybody has been meaning to fix, and Orleans has had forty-three years to stop finding them odd.

Mike O'Connor's stated reason: people come to Cape Cod for something that wasn't concocted in a boardroom on Madison Avenue.

The unstated one is more useful. A store that opens at 9:17 is announcing, before you reach the door, that the person inside is going to answer your question differently than you expected. Which is more or less the entire business.

The coal truck was market research

In 1983 he was twenty-nine, trained at Westfield State to be a guidance counselor, and unemployable.

"Basically it was the case of no one would hire me," he has said, "so I hired myself."

What he was doing instead was delivering coal. Actual coal, in 1983, on Cape Cod, for a friend at Stove Place II. Months of hauling fuel up other people's driveways, which is when he noticed the thing that changed his life and which nobody riding that truck was supposed to be noticing.

"Everywhere we went for deliveries, everybody had bird feeders," he told Cape Cod Wave. "It hit me. I could sell birdfeeders."

Then he had to find a landlord, which went about how you'd expect.

"They didn't want a 29-year-old goofball bird guy."

Somebody eventually said yes. His first customers were a couple named Don and Bobbie who bought a small bag of birdseed, and he took their picture, which tells you he already suspected this might work and wanted evidence of the beginning.

"My goal was to stay in business long enough so that the people who said I told you so would be wrong."

He moved once, in 1989, across Route 6A into an old candle shop. He is still in it.

Twelve hundred columns, paid in birdseed

In 2000 a customer named Dan Perkes — a retired Associated Press executive — told him the Cape Codder was looking for writers and then would not let it go.

The first column was about attracting hummingbirds. He built the thing on the model of The Straight Dope, the Chicago question-and-answer column, because he'd diagnosed the central problem with writing about birds.

"Bird talk is often dry and dull," he wrote in his farewell column, "and if I didn't want people to fall asleep, I needed to add a little edginess to the mix, and that was something I could totally do."

He ran it every week for twenty-two years — close to twelve hundred columns. A store employee named Cathy Clark drew every illustration by hand. An editor in Marstons Mills, Olivia Miller, went through every draft adding grammar and subtracting misspellings and, by his account, most of his best cuss words. She was paid in the occasional bag of birdseed.

Miller had a name for the format. She called it laugh and learn.

His son once described the method out loud, and O'Connor repeated it on himself without objection: the first answer is never a straight answer, it's a smart-aleck answer, and the second answer is serious and gives you far more than you asked for.

The weekly run ended December 31, 2021. A few have appeared since. Two became books for Beacon Press — Why Don't Woodpeckers Get Headaches? in 2007 and Why Do Bluebirds Hate Me? in 2013 — and his writing turned up in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004, which is not a line most people who have delivered coal for a living get to put on a jacket.

Birder's World's verdict: you will be hard-pressed to find a funnier writer in all of birding.

What actually comes through the door

Ninety percent, he says, is squirrels.

Everybody complains about squirrels. Another eight percent is how to get rid of birds — crows, or the woodpecker working on the cedar shingles at six in the morning. Those are his numbers, offered in the spirit of a man who has been keeping a running tally in his head since Reagan, and they leave two percent.

Twelve hundred columns came out of two percent.

Some of it doesn't fit any category at all. A customer once split his head open in the parking lot badly enough that they pulled a T-shirt off the rack to hold against it until the paramedics came, and afterward O'Connor had to hose down the pavement to keep the gulls off. That evening a taxi pulled in, and the same man walked back through the door wrapped in bandages and announced his business: "I still have to get my birdseed."

A stranger once came in holding a cheeseburger with a bite out of it and complained that it was dry. O'Connor told him he was welcome to whatever condiments he could find. The man looked around for a moment and asked, "Where the heck am I?"

A woodchuck set up in the store and growled at customers. A skunk browsed the clothing section, which cleared the room fast. "It's funny how quickly people will leave a store when they learn that a skunk is shopping in the next aisle."

And one Christmas Eve a red fox came across the porch, through the open front door, past the register without a word, straight back to the bird feeder section as if it had been in before, up onto a shelf, a long look around, and out into the night.

"Foxes are notoriously cheap."

Why the phone rings in September

The birds are molting, and every year that produces a small wave of people convinced their yard is sick.

Cardinals and blue jays sometimes shed their head feathers fast enough to go completely bald. It looks appalling. It is fine.

"Their head feathers will grow back," he has written, "and no, their heads won't get sunburned. Don't bother putting out tiny hats or sunscreen; your birds won't use them."

The ospreys are clearing out too, and they don't go together. The female leaves first — after a summer of feeding demanding young, she's done, and the male and the fledglings follow later. A woman once told him she could tell the male from the female at a glance. He asked how.

"The female looks exhausted."

He didn't argue.

He also runs the same warning every year around now, and it's the single most immediately useful thing in this piece: buy seed in small amounts in late summer, and don't store it in the house, or the meal moths will still be with you well past Labor Day.

Forty-three years of this. A man who could not get hired, in a shop that opens at a time nobody would choose, answering the same question about squirrels for four decades and finding twelve hundred columns' worth of everything else in the margins.

One more thing, and it isn't optional. Bring him a joke and you get a pencil.

No joke, no pencil.

Bird Watcher's General Store | 36 Route 6A, Orleans (GPS: enter 36 Cranberry Highway)
Mon–Sat 9:17 a.m.–5:11 p.m. · Sun 10:13 a.m.–5:03 p.m. · 508-255-6974

Sources: Bird Watcher's General Store and the Ask the Bird Folks archive · Cape Cod Wave · ShoutOut SoCal · Beacon Press