Bossed around by little birds

*goldenrod on the long lawn*

Yesterday when I came in from chores the tame chickadees were ticked right off. You see when a friend gave the boss about a million old Holstein World magazines, not quite all of them made it upstairs to the spare bedroom. A hefty few languished on the back porch….smack dab on top of the bag of sunflower seeds. I was too lazy to move them (besides the principal of the thing) so the wild birds have been on their own.

However, the little black and white birds had had enough deprivation. They clung, up side down, to the lower branches of the honey locust and cursed me mightily in chickadeese.

Dee! Dee, dee, dee!
Peep, dee, dee…Peep! Dee!

I had no trouble translating. So I hoisted those smelly old magazines in their battered, crumbling boxes off the birdseed bag, along with Alan’s blue tackle box and spinning rod, (which have been there since camp). The feeders were so starkly devoid of sustenance that I took them down and hauled them inside to fill them. As soon as I hung them back up chickadees lined up on the clothesline still chirping impatiently for their turn at the seed spouts.

It was well worth it. This morning a sassy male cardinal did a hummingbird act in front of the plastic tube feeder trying to extract a seed. Cardinals can’t hover for beans, but it was fun to watch him try. Half a dozen chickadees, a veritable Christmas tree of goldfinches, some downy woodpeckers and titmice joined a pair of white-breasted nuthatches eating seeds at the feeders and drinking from the pond.

Then a small brown bird slipped unobtrusively down the bark of the honey locust to pick around in the rocks of the herb garden. It searched each flowerpot and walking onion looking earnestly for something to eat. It was a house wren, probably the one that spent the summer ferociously defending the bridge to the barn. It seemed out of place among all the tame seed feeders, but I enjoyed watching it as it jerked its way around the pond eating whatever it found there.