8:03 a.m. 7 degrees, wind N 5 mph. Sky: sun behind a hazy screen shines like the filament of a light bulb. Permanent streams: the upper, iced over. The lower, dark lead of water down the middle, ice everywhere else. The water rose and spread and froze over the sand peninsula. Wetlands: hushed, off-yellow reeds brighter in the cloud-filtered sunlight. Pond: an Arctic landscape, no open water. Otter may need a jack-hammer or a detonator to break the seal. Far uphill, feeder stream gurgling under an ice blanket.
Hairy woodpecker eviscerates aspen limb. Flakes of bark. Showers of wood chips. Eleven turkeys gathering acorns and sunflower seeds. A silence of nuthatches. Not one tin-horn toot. Swept south by the cold front?
Busybody chickadees, everywhere and noisy. Bookend my walk. On the feeders when I leave. On the feeders when I return. Flying back and forth, sunflower seed in bill. Hides seeds, up to a thousand a day, more than eighty thousand a winter, one reason I've gone through forty-pounds in the past ten days. Called a scatter hoarder, one seed here, one seed there. Tucked in a crevice. Any crevice. Inserted under bark or lichen. In tufts of pine and spruce needles, in the crotch of twigs, in barn overhang and windowsills. Remembers the location and quality of each seed—bird with a very high IQ. To accommodate finding my sunflower seeds, chickadee's hippocampus, on the floor of its brain, the center of memory and emotion, grows more extensive in the fall, shrinks in the spring.
Fortunately, shrinkage doesn't affect a chickadee’s emotion or disposition—jovial (and tolerant) year-round. Worth the price of sunflower seeds. Untethered magic in the front yard always welcomed . . . particularly during a pandemic.
yes, same here - gone thru 2 x 40 pound bags of sunflower seeds since mid-November for 4 tube feeders. Only the husked expensive Meaties seeds were available - $60 a bag! Blue jays fill great crop-fulls. Cheerful chickadees working one seed per trip - the surrounding woods must be well stocked. The cost of seed I guess is worth the price of admission to watch daily dramas... I think birds and mammals must sense impending pressure drop of the approaching snowstorm? Bird activity steady all day today. I saw a redtail hawk flapping in a brushy blackberry thicket with what appeared to be a blue jay. I watched a red fox at the veggie garden perimeter fence crouch while hunting voles in the tall grass. Better keep kitty inside. It saw me on my front porch and sat down. When I twitched to move to get binoculars, it shot like a bullet uphill, over a stonewall and into the woodlot at incredible speed. The snowstorm is being hyped - always a set-up it seems.
We have a plexiglass feeder attached to our window. Chickadees by the dozens, nuthatches, both red breast and white, 4 bluejays and both hairy and Downey woodpeckers come visit. Our 3 Tufted titmice(mouses?) have become very confident when approaching the window with us on the other side. The determination needed for a peanut or sunflower seed!!
One of our granddaughter’s first clear words was “shick-a-dee”.
A question: can you “over feed” the birds? Is it a bad thing to have me be their constant food source?