A few evenings ago I was dashing about the kitchen chopping and dicing, and checking the fridge for exotic ingredients to fold into a chili mix. Then I heard a knock on the door. Hardly a soul visits after dark, and if someone does visit, they are often asking me to perform a pro bono community art project.

If that happened to be the nature of this visit, I decided the caller wouldn't mind waiting a bit longer. After all, I was in the middle of adding secret, new ingredients to this particular pot of chili. (Just after Halloween I'd rendered down a pumpkin. The pumpkin puree had already found its way into some muffins and a large pot of soup.) Now, there was still a large blob of puree patiently waiting in the fridge. Surely any chili worth its salt could benefit from large dollops of pumpkin puree, so in it went. At last, I broke away from my cooking and went to the back door.

It was Dave. Dave never wants me to do pro bono artwork so I was relieved to see him. "Is this a bad time?" Dave asked. I replied "Yes."

When I'm cooking, interruptions are best avoided. I was also wearing summer shorts in the house, so standing on the back porch on a cold evening wasn't too appealing. Dave said he had something for me in the truck and grandly gestured in the direction of the pitch black driveway. I slipped on some winter boots and followed. Earlier, I'd put out the word to Dave that if he ever saw some exercise machinery at one of the share sheds - we share a passion for share sheds - he should grab it. Perhaps that was what he'd found!

Dave opened the passenger door of the truck and on the floor lay a bundle of plastic tubes, bowls and a metal rod or two. "It's a bird feeder" Dave pronounced, "or it was." He scooped up the pile of material and placed it in my arms. I thanked him and said I'd just given one of my bird feeders to the art centre today and now he'd brought me another one.

I scrutinized the armful of material on the way up to the house and realized it was a large, 3-cylinder tube feeder, a feeder type I'd never had before. It didn't appear that there were any pieces missing but I'd only know after putting the feeder together. Suddenly the chili cooking could take a back seat.

I dumped all the feeder bits into hot water and returned to the back step to wash them thoroughly. Then, I attempted to reconstruct the feeder. All the cylinders, each with several pewter feeder ports, fit nicely into the base but it was obvious that the metal rod securing the roof to the rest of the feeder was corroded. In its present state the roof would be impossible to remove and there would be no way to refill the tubes. That's why it was abandoned!

I attempted to unscrew the corroded metal rod but it broke in half. There was little I could do to repair the feeder right now, so I headed back to my chili cooking.

The next day I bought a four-dollar threaded metal rod and assembled the feeder. It didn't look very big inside the house, but outside swinging from the bear-proof hook above the back door, it looks like the space shuttle's solid fuel booster rockets in size and shape. I concluded that a feeder of this size and quality would cost at least $60. What a find!

The new feeder now gently sways outside while the birds warm to its presence. And the pumpkin puree chili also turned out quite nice.