In St. John’s, Newfoundland, an ethology enthusiast, Elling Lien, has created a miniature bar designed specifically for birds. In reality it is an anthropomorphic feeding station, but don’t let that spoil the fun.
The bar has been fitted with model bar stools, a Coca-Cola machine and even a working miniature TV. Lien christened the pub after its first visitor, a male junco he named Junco Bob, who made the novel discovery of finding birdseed behind the bar.
Elling’s father Jon Lien was an animal behaviourist known for research on whales, but also studied wild birds, an interest he clearly handed down to his son. Lien junior was also inspired by a television station in Norway called NRK, which had been broadcasting what they call Slow TV over the past few years, feeds that document certain situations through real time streams. He told Buzzfeed:
Last year they had a 24-hour live web stream of a bird feeder that looked like a scandinavian café. So these wild birds would come to the feeder and look like they were huge birds in a human-sized café, and I loved it.. But putting them in that café made their behaviour relatable, like it was a soap opera, like they were characters. It felt like a real window into the life of these wild birds too.
But this year NRK didn’t repeat the broadcast, so Elling created his own to fill the void. The design of his bird bar was based on a human bar in Newfoundland, St. John’s called the Inn of Olde, which he affectionately describes as “a quintessential dive bursting with sincere, bizarre, unique character and lots of weird random stuff”.
And apparently Junco’s Bar is already establishing a loyal and solid clientele.
There are definitely regulars. There’s one dark-eyed junco couple that visit about once an hour or so, and sometimes a few times an hour. When I started the pub a week ago there was this lone male junco who seemed kind of skittish and weird, and he would visit really often, but one day he brought a female along with him, and they’re inseparable. It’s a bar romance. It’s absolutely doomed to fail, like most bar romances, but they seem like they’re having fun for the time being.
You can follow Junco’s Pub on Twitter or live on the pub’s 24-hour livestream.
