Welcoming the birds

Robin at the bottom of the wren porch steps (through the screen door)

There was a wren here just a second ago!

This morning on the sitting porch

The boss's folks were farming one of these two farms when he was born just a couple months shy of sixty years ago. I have been helping him for well over a third of that. However, we have only lived here as a couple since his lovely mother passed away on my birthday seven years ago. We moved up from town then.

She always fed the birds and had a nice array, including red-bellied woodpeckers back before they were known to range here and a goshawk that liked to kill pigeons in the heifer barn yard.

However, I have never seen anything like the assortment we have begun to have in the last three or four years. There are probably a lot of factors in play. We have let some areas grow up to brush and wild plants, not so much to attract birds as because of lack of time and energy to keep it down. Alan has mowed out a number of paths that wind among mullberrries and old plantations of flowers. We have also planted some things for birds...lots of sunflowers, bee balm, rudbeckia (Peg had it, but we have encouraged it). We let the black caps flourish (mostly because WE like to eat them). We put in the garden pond, so there is the sound of splashing water....bird baths...feeders....

On the way over to Coby last week...our favorite swamp with pileated woodpecker holes

Anyhow, what a summer this has been for birds... If I was faster and he was slower, my early morning sitting porch photo would have included one of the mockingbirds. He wanted to get onto that porch for some reason this morning and gave an irritate chack!! whenever he tried to land on the railing and found me there first. Meanwhile the wren was singing his heart out on the other porch. A short list of what we have seen over the past week (not all of them right in the yard or very welcome either, but visible from the house or yard) pigeons, sassenachs (English *^&%$$ sparrows) starlings, mallard ducks, grackles, chickadees, gold finches, turkey vultures (sharing something nasty with a coyote out on the hill) red-tailed hawk, red-winged black birds, barn swallows, chimney swifts, kestrels, robins, savanna sparrows, song sparrows, chipping sparrows, several catbirds (the mockingbird is cussing on the wren's porch as I type this) indigo buntings, cedar waxwings, a mother Baltimore oriole and family, ruby-throated hummingbirds, blue jays, crows, killdeers, pileated woodpecker, cowbirds, phoebe, common yellow throat warblers, downy woodpecker family with lots of demanding kids, at least four families of cat birds, house wrens (two families), song sparrows, cardinals, great blue heron and more...these are just what I can think of off the top of my head, and just what we have seen in the past week.

It is unfailingly entertaining just to hang out in the yard. The birds figure that it belongs to them and make their feelings known. When they are not nesting, the chickadees come right to the back door to demand seeds. The mockers fly down at our feet for some reason known only to them and flash their wings at us. They are the most companionable of birds and seem to like us.

Taken a little while ago right next to the house

The wren sings to us every time we go to the front door to drive away the starlings and sassenachs that want to steal their nest.
The hummingbirds pitch a fit if the feeder gets empty.

I like having them around.
(It is part of why I never go anywhere if I don't have to.)

Lykers pond...see that thing swimming in the water? Liz and I think it was a young otter. It certainly swam like one. Some middle-aged idiot, during one of those miserable senior moments, forgot that there is a perfectly serviceable, if slightly battered, pair of Bushnell binoculars in the car. ...so we will never be sure...but it sure looked like an otter