Back Yard Birding

I am taking a one day hiatus from my ventures and adventures. I was watching a cardinal couple in our bird feeder earlier today and thought I would write a bit about the local fauna—or just maybe the birds.

Steve builds some absolutely wonderful rustic bird houses. He has been doing this for several years and sells a couple from time to time. The bird houses are made from cypress, native cedar and local grapevine. Sometimes, when I get talking too fast, I say they are made from cydar (the fast way of saying cypress and cedar, I guess). He then branched out to bird feeders.

Now, I grew up on a chicken farm. Birds were not friends. They brought disease to the chickens. Although my uncle the farm owner never did much to discourage birds, they were not appreciated. Therefore, it took me a very long time to learn to appreciate having them in my yard. Steve, on the other hand, always seems to want to do something for the birds like keeping the bird feeders full of seed.  Steve loves to watch the birds.  Me, not so much...or so I thought.

He moved his one feeder from an area where the squirrels ate more than the birds to a double metal plant or lantern holder. The problem with this was it made a really great buffet for two of my cats. Roscoe could easily jump the height of the feeder and snag a bird on his way down. Well, this was not working very well! So, Steve put in a much higher 4X4 piece of wood with a cross section of Re-bar, thus holding two feeders. This seems to working well except we still get a squirrel visitor daily. Noise will chase him away for a while. The cats can no longer get the birds as it involves climbing. By the time they get to the feeder, the birds are gone.

Mr. and Mrs. Cardinal are our most frequent guests. He is sooooooo pretty. She is bossy. He lets other birds dine with him in one feeder. In the second feeder, she squawks at any outsider till they go away. As a matter of fact, I don’t ever remember seeing them both in the same feeder together. She must nag him, too. They are pretty and enjoyable to watch.

We also have had a red-headed woodpecker munching away at the seed. Woodpeckers are interesting. The metal chimneys in many of the homes in the neighborhood seem to be a fine calling card for a mate. Around this time of the year, we often hear rat-tat-tat, rat-tat-tat while he pecks away against the metal. The first year that I heard this, I wondered why he was not pecking at a tree. I was thinking food. He, obviously, had something else on his mind. This ritual goes on for up to three weeks. Then, we do not hear it again until the next year.

The houses attract Florida blue birds. The first year Steve left one of his houses on the front porch, we started to see some activity. A twig here; a larger one there. Then, one day no more blue birds. The house was abandoned, twigs spread out all over the place—on the house, on the porch. We saw a couple in our back yard a day or two later and wondered if they were the same ones. That bird house hung high in the tree. Why did they move? Well, a few days later, Betsy, our old lady kitty (she’ll be fifteen this year) was sitting like a piece of China--which she often resembles--sitting on the porch railing. Guess the birds moved because they did not care for the neighborhood.

This year is the first time that I have noticed regular full-sized blue jays…not the smaller version usually called Florida scrub jays. These are the only ones Mrs. Cardinal does not seem to chase away. For that matter, she is seldom there when they are. Mr. Cardinal, however, will share with the blue jays; and the blue jays don’t seem to mind sharing with him.

One morning during the recent three-week long cold snap (we had killing frost every night), I looked out to see the ground covered with robins. There were probably forty or fifty of them.  Wait a minute! Robins are the state bird for Connecticut, not Florida. Guess they have not gone north yet. They do not, however, seem to care about the bird feeder and seed. They go more for the more substantial fare of worms. (We had not yet let the cats out for the day. So, the birds were in fine shape).

There is a passel of smaller birds. I have not been able to identify them. But with a good bird book I should soon be able to so do.