Jingle

Just came in from taking Nick out for his morning constitutional. I feed the birds just outside the kitchen window, a practice which this year has been exceptionally rewarding. It is unusually cold, the ground is frozen very hard and the sparrow-folk are hungry. They come in droves....if you fill it they will come....We have a lot of juncos, an entire flock of white-throated sparrows, a whole batch of puzzling LBB's (little brown birds...I think they may be tree sparrows, which are a constant around here, but no central breast spot is visible,) plus a song sparrow or two and all the other common feeder visitors. Guzzling gold finches, hungry house finches, chattering chickadees, nuthatches, woodpeckers, dozens of mourning doves and over on the other side of the house, the dearly beloved mockingbird clan.

Anyhow as I stood on the edge of the porch (barefoot, the more fool me) I could just barely make out an entire ground covering of small black blobs, standing in ranks around the porch, the honey locust tree and the garden pond. There were dozens and dozens of birds dotting every foot of ground, neatly spaced as if someone had laid out a grid pattern for them..
They were waiting for me.
(and my trusty can of sunflower seeds.)
I could tell by the jingle.