While you are staying the fuck inside, you may, like me, have discovered a whole new ecosystem going on. I’ve been at home working while also intermittently staring out the back window for hours at a time frozen with existential dread.
There’s an entire bird and squirrel society carrying on obliviously, which I find oddly comforting.
The Fat Squirrel
He does a high wire act to get the bird feeder, shakes it vigorously, and then jumps down to the ground to eat his bounty.
Mr. Cardinal
He’s the dick of the bird world. Mr. Cardinal scatters all the chickadees and other little birds and takes over the entire feeder. I mean, he is a he and all…it’s always some asshole guy ruining it for everyone else.
17 Birds Who Are Complete Assholes
A Cat
A cat showed up today and I’m afraid he’s looking for a quick and easy snack. Stay inside, cats!
Any new discoveries in your little ecosystem?
purdy burdy 🙂
anyhoo… since last wednesday ive developped a kind of twitch whenever i see or hear do do do
the radio station at work was taking requests that day.. one of the very first requests i heard was some 6 year old requesting baby shark (the dj actually never heard of it..but made it a point to find it for the kid)
now my co workers randomly start singing it every day….
oh woes me :p
…I don’t know if any of us have the power to invoke the “by request of the management” thing…but…I vote “please spare us from baby shark” be at least in the top 5 rules
…you have my sympathies…& those of several friends with kids who’ve been there
I like annoying co-workers with Surfin Bird, but everybody’s heard of it by now.
We’ve got a ton of bird feeders–Mrs. Butcher works at a place that sells them. We’ve got squirrel proof feeders and feeders that flummox the starlings and blue jays (so the goldfinch, chickadees and blue birds can eat), and even flat feeders that would be for everyone, except we put safflower in there to keep the starlings away and put in hot pepper suet to keep the squirrels away. The juncos are ground feeders so they eat everything that gets spilled. The woodpeckers can hang upside down to get the suet in a cage under the flat feeder.
There’s also a few neighborhood cats that will occasionally take out a bird or a chipmunk.
Then there are the owls, hawks, ospreys, the occasional eagle, the otters, swans, geese, mallard ducks, ring-necked ducks, hooded mergansers (my favorite), kingfishers, wild turkeys, flickers, and those goddamned groundhogs.
We get a Cooper’s Hawk every once in a while and he is very cool.
Cooper’s Hawks are unique in that they don’t take their food to go–they dine in. I learned this when I came home (previous home) one day to find one chowing down on one of our chickens. I was…not pleased. The hawks at our current place are red tailed and sharp shinned.
Forgot to mention the blue heron and the white tailed deer.
I live in an urban area but we get owls, hawks, and once in a blue moon we get deer. Raccoons, possums, frogs, toads, salamanders, teeny garter snakes, scary big black snakes, and also blue herons in the stream nearby.
The coolest of all are the foxes, except when they scream, which sounds like a cat or a baby getting eaten. Getting woken up in the middle of the night by a screaming fox in the spring when the windows are open is a weird thing.
It sounds like a beautiful place.
It really is. We lucked out big time when we bought it because the seller’s agent was an incompetent boob. Also our timing was perfect. Within the past few years a bunch of places have been renovated on our street and have sold for way more than what we paid for ours. Normally, people like us to get to live in a place like this.
It’s almost hummingbird feeder time. I put out a cheapo one (maybe $10) last year and was surprised to see them regularly coming to feed, or to fight over it.
This year I’m putting up three, and I definitely recommend them.
https://www.audubon.org/news/hummingbird-feeding-faqs
I also forgot about the hummers, and the orioles–those little guys love to eat grape jelly. Can’t get enough of it. Oriole nests are the most incredible pieces of engineering. They actually are more like bags that just hang off the very end of a thin branch. It doesn’t matter how much the wind blows, that sucker is not coming off.
My dad got big into bird feeding after he retired, it’s hours of entertainment if you like to see the savagery of nature right out your window. Raccoons are particularly great to watch, they’re Nature’s MacGuyvers.
Anyway, he’s a small one https://news.avclub.com/this-rescue-racoon-is-too-cute-for-its-own-damn-good-an-1842463093
Just refilled our bird feeders last night, and noticed that our nesting box has a sparrow family residing in it. They are pretty hilarious to watch, although the box is in a far corner of the yard, so binocs are best. We have a birdhouse in the shape of a camping tent much closer to the house that has had residents in the past, so we’ll see if that happens again this year.