If you build it...

Remember when I said I started feeding the birds again?  This weekend is the first time I refilled one of the three feeders, the one that hangs in front of our living room window.  The two in the backyard are still full from a month ago.  It has been slow going.  But, they come occasionally, and I think once spring comes around, the birds will too.  Every evening after work I look to see if the level of seed has gone done, and any day that I am home I can't walk walk past a window without peeking to see if they're there.  We get very excited when we spot a bird actually using the feeders.

Today, however, brought a whole new level of HOLY COW to the bird feeding experience.

The feeder that I just refilled is literally right on the other side of the living room window, about a foot away from the window.  It hangs just above our evergreen bushes, in which the sparrows like to hang about and lounge in between feedings. In fact, when I filled the feeder yesterday, I dropped the bag of seed with a loud thud, and then jumped out of my skin as 6-8 sparrows took off to another tree that wasn't so close to me.  We even have an occasional chipmunk that crawls up and gets its head stuck inside the feeder once it fills its cheeks, and then plummets into the bushes once it finally figures out how to pull its head out.  So there is quite a bit of movement and life around there, even when the feeding is slow going.

I was talking to my husband in the living room while my son took a nap today.  Out of the corner of my eye I could see over his shoulder and out the window to the feeder.  Mid-sentence I froze, and I think I repeated OH MY GOSH OH MY GOSH OH MY GOSH a handful of times before I figured out that I should probably tell my husband to turn around.  A red-tail hawk swooped in and just sat on top of the evergreen next to the feeder, eyes fixed down to the ground, probably searching for a bird or chipmunk.  It jumped around to different parts of the bushes, flew over to the front porch, and then flew away.  I saw it later soaring over the houses behind us, still hunting.

I didn't have my phone on me to be able to take a picture, and there is no way I was going to step away to get it, because I knew this wouldn't last long.  So this picture is something similar to the one we saw today.  It was huge and impressive and I can't believe it was sitting right outside my window. I'm also glad my dog is 30 pounds, because that hawk looked awfully hungry, and I would feel a little anxious about letting him out in the yard for a few days.

So, I guess I don't quite have the bustling hot-spot of bird-feeding yards quite yet, but the cool factor of the hawk will last me a while.  Perhaps that's why I don't have a bustling hot-spot, maybe the little birds have been enduring close encounters with this hawk and are choosing to stay hidden.  We'll see what the spring brings.

For the Birds

I wouldn't really say it's a hobby, but another "like" of mine that has fallen to the wayside in the recent past is feeding the birds.  We don't have any fancy birds around here.  I attribute that to an abundance of forest preserves around our neighborhood.  If you had miles of open and quiet paradise, why would you want to hang out in my little plot of world with noisy kids and smelly cars?  Or noisy cars and smelly kids.  Either way.  But even if it is just a collection of house sparrows, I love watching the birds out the window.  And when it is warm enough to have windows and doors open, the twittering of birds in the morning and evening is one of my favorite sounds.

It has become an unfortunate habit that I'm very diligent feeding the birds for months at a time, and then when we run out of seed, many months go by before I start up again.  It's not that I don't want to.  I look longingly at the empty feeders almost daily.  I just let it fall to the bottom of the priority list.

Once I fill the feeders, it always takes several days for the birds to come back. I envision a funny little scene where the elder birds are perched in a nearby tree, feathers ruffled and squawking.  Then the younger whippersnapper birds come over, an argument ensues, with the elder birds saying "She can't be trusted!" and the younger birds responding "But it looks so good!"  And the younger, rebel birds always win out, as they eventually come back and empty the feeders within a day or two.

So today, a new finch feeder to replace the one ruined in last summer's storm, a large bag of birdseed, and a new pack of suet have been lovingly
set out in the yard.  This blog has been motivating me to keep up with the "likes" I have left behind, so I hope to at least keep feeding the birds through the winter.  I can't keep upsetting the elder birds, otherwise they'll probably start eating up all the springtime vegetable seeds in the garden just to spite me.