The write-in candidate

As New Year’s Day arrived this year, the population of the United States had jumped by almost 1.76 million in just 12 months, giving us — get ready for this number — 335,893,238 Americans, according to the United States Census Bureau.

Which is embarrassing. If we’d tried a little harder, we could have pushed the final numbers up to a full 900,000 on top of the 335 million. Or — with a lot more effort — even to a tidy 500 million.

Clearly there’s not enough unprotected sex in this country.

Look at Florida’s numbers. Last year the population was about 22.6 million, but by next year this time it’s going to be 23.2 million. Which doesn’t sound as good as more than 25 million, the population estimate for 2032.

Think of all the construction we could have generated and the real estate we could have sold by now if we’d shoved our libidos into high gear and come up with the 25 mill in population by next year, instead of lollygagging along for the next seven or eight years to get there.

None of those population numbers really matter, though. Not if every Floridian knows what makes a Carolina wren thrive, and votes for it.

Want to save Florida? Vote Carolina wren.

To have so many people (say, 25 million) using supermarkets chock-a-block with fresh food, drinking city water unrestricted by boiling notices, sleeping in beds that don’t float away on the next king tide — to do all that deep into the 21st century, we have to know what the Carolina wren needs, and provide it.

Often you can hear the little bird and not see it. And only some of them sing — the males. But boy, do they sing.

“It’s everywhere and it throws its voice around like a master ventriloquist. He sounds like he’s all over the top of the canopy when he’s usually perched on a limb at eye level, singing ‘TEACHER TEACHER TEACHER,’” Dr. Jose Padilla-Lopez told me, describing the song. He’s a pediatrician and widely respected ornithological expert.

“I love the Carolina wren. I would start a drive to change the name to Florida wren. I truly believe we have more Thyrotorus ludovicianus than both Carolinas, even though it’s South Carolina’s state bird.”

The bird can adapt to encroaching human populations, too, especially if they avoid paving every last little thing. And it has, along the Eastern Seaboard of North America from Canada to northern Mexico and Yucatán.

It may not be the prettiest bird, or the most desperate; Florida’s only endemic bird, the Florida scrub jay, for example, is protected as a threatened species under the Federal Endangered Species Act.

But if you want to save the water, save the wildlife, save the agricultural remains of the day in crop or meat production for the next 75 years and beyond — if you want to rescue the nation’s 27th state (as of March 3, 1845, when less than 70,000 sweating, mosquito-bitten residents lived here) — every man, woman and child should understand the Carolina wren.

They like to nest in the openings of trees and stumps no higher than about 6 feet off the ground, which means they need some woods. But if people are part of the scene, they can use old flower pots, mailboxes, the covers for propane tanks, overhangs of one sort or another — just about anything similar, say ornithologists.

Carolina wrens are not against development. They’re against greedy, thoughtless development.

They thrive in “brushy thickets, lowland cypress swamps, bottomland woods, and ravines choked with hemlock and rhododendron (along with) shrubby, wooded residential areas, overgrown farmland, dilapidated buildings and brushy suburban yards,” according to the Cornell University website www.allaboutbirds.org .

That’s perfect for us. We can still offer that, or most of that, if we choose.

We probably want to avoid letting our farmland become overgrown, though, unless we turn it into preserves. As soon as we do, some developer will buy it from a tired old farmer and convince county commissioners to up and alter the smartgrowth comprehensive plans devised in an earlier era.

As soon as that happens, everything changes forever. The developer will smack a couple of thousand homes on it, add some commercial space, and let taxpayers fund the roads and sewers built out to that former farmland, where no Carolina wren will ever set its anisodactyl foot again.

To look out for the birds, we also have to look out for what they eat. That requires a range of both flora and fauna supported by clean water.

The Carolina wren is a gourmand of exceptionally broad taste, dining on “caterpillars, moths, stick bugs, leafhoppers, beetles, grasshoppers, crickets and cockroaches,” not to mention the occasional lizard or frog, along with rotting fruit and seeds from plants, even including poison ivy.

I don’t know about you, but anybody who reduces the population of cockroaches and poison ivy is OK with me.

We aren’t supposed to anthropomorphize creatures, but I like the Carolina wren’s lifestyle, too. Males and females build nests together, both help feed their chicks, and they mate for life.

There are some things they don’t do, which we wish all citizens did: pay taxes, help old people cross the street, lobby hard for world peace.

But they do so much else. And if we protect them by protecting what they need, we’re going to be OK — greed and climate change, or not.

This is a presidential election year. So I say vote — vote for Carolina wren. Maybe they could be a write-in candidate.

They’d probably adapt to the White House pretty easily, too. Lots of fat cockroaches running around the place, from time to time. ¦

The post The write-in candidate first appeared on Charlotte County Florida Weekly .