A spagnapasseri - a system to literally, in Calabrese dialect, “scare sparrows” - and other birds -off the fig trees in my aunt’s backyard in Long Island. Now is the time for figs to ripen, and the sparrows can’t stay away; following them, into the broken skin of the fruit, come the ants. 

Everything in this spagnapasseri  is remade from something else - torn strips of threadbare bedsheets are tied to branches, and plastic water jugs loom around them. My aunt’s old housedress hangs like a flapping ghost. A white basin rigged to a nearby fence where climbing green beans grow is a vagile, my aunt says, to bang with a wooden spoon to send bursts of brown feathers fluttering away. The figs are safe.