goddessing

It was inevitable, the phone call.

"Are you ok?"

Longish pause to consider how long or short my response should be.

Eventually -- "Yeah, I'm fine. Just juggling lots of balls right now."

Mott, a meatspace friend for over thirty years, admonished me to get back to blogging, no matter how many balls I might be juggling.

So, about feeding starlings and grackles: They love the new perches I created from wooden chopsticks, wire skewers, steel machine bolts and duct tape for the Mandarin feeder, after they broke off the little manufacturer-supplied plastic perches that were never meant to hold their weight. (Yes, in late February when the wind-chill put the temperature outside well below O°F, I convinced my beloved to brave the elements to replace broken perches so our precious birds could continue to feed. Imagine how pleased she was a day or two later to find the new set broken and me agitating for a new fix. Admire her with me, for a moment, as you visualize her, heavily wrapped and traipsing once again over two feet of compacted, ice-topped snow to retrieve the feeder and bring it to me, safe in the warmth of the house, where I could clean it out and jerry-rig unbreakable perches to get us through the rest of the winter. Then, for the sake of completion, imagine her getting all wrapped up again, on a Sunday which should be her day of rest, and then retracing that inhospitable, frigid ground to hang the now-bionic feeder again.)

Fortunately, by the time the squirrel genius of the neighborhood figured out how to use these long, heavy perches to hold his weight on an otherwise squirrel-proof feeder, and empty it within a day or two, the snow had melted and the temperature risen by 60 degrees or so. I say "fortunately" because by then my beloved was willing to go out once again and move the "squirrel-proof" feeder so far out of the squirrel's range (e.g., eight feet from the nearest tree) that he can no longer outfox (so to speak) the system.

And lest I make myself vulnerable to the criticism that Nathaniel Sr. laid on his son David -- "Infinite possibilities and all [she] can do is whine." (Six Feet Under) -- let me say this: The one benefit to feeding starlings and grackles is that I now know the song and chit of the red-winged blackbird, a species that never visited the feeder until the larger blacks showed the way.

And I suppose another benefit is coming to grips with the fact that starlings and grackles and all the other black birds are just as worthy of backyard feeding as are the colorful singing birds the feeder was meant to attract. And if the blackbirds (and jays) crowd-out and bully-out the smaller, more colorful, more sweetly-singing birds? Easy solution -- add a second shepherd's hook to the squirrel-proof pole system and hang from it a second Mandarin feeder, making it unattractive to the larger birds by filling it with the safflower seed to which they are indifferent.

Labels: bird watching

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