Since I’ve fed birds, I have only lived in New England and mostly on the south-facing coasts of Massachusetts and Maine. That makes me useless for some things, like telling you what birds to watch for, but a bit more useful for recommending bird feeders and good value birdseeds. To the left, by the way is a Common Grackle. My brother-in-law calls them Crackles, which just about says it all: They are smart, loud, large, and unbelievably adaptable.
Open to let me prattle on
Cat TV
Jackson is an odd little creature that will actually watch TV. The others are not quite as creative, so I feed the birds and rodentia in the garden to give them a means of daydreaming the kill.
I suspect there’s an old age gene that turns on birdfeeding as a pastime. My guess is it’s located between the insomnia gene and the judgementalism gene. My father had a small brass tray tacked to the casement window sill outside and just to the left of his chair, and he’d prattle on about the cardinals with such goggle-eyed enjoyment that he invariably got some god-awful, but cardinal-related, gewgaw for Christmas. The rubber cardinal that failed to perch on his finger and sagged on the underside of it upside down is likely still around here somewhere. In fact, I think my son has it.
Feeding the things slowly infected me. It started as something I did for the cats to watch, calling it Cat TV and thinking I’d made that up in the cleverness of my own uproarious mind. (Nope.)
Now, however, birds are also my entertainment. Snots (whose real name is Clydesdale Annie) goes out daily in her 24″ crate to sit among the rodentia and jays as they gobble up the peanuts in the shell that I strew about. Because Annie is Siberian and has an enormous amount of fur, she does this year-round. I have found I have to set timers to make sure I don’t leave her out too long. I brought her in once covered with snow. She lost interest in going out for a while after that.
Not yet suffering from dementia, I enjoy my birds from indoors. I have a garden enclosed by privacy fence that, first of all, lets me trot outdoors without dressing. That’s huge when you top off the feeders each day in the summer and sleep in a men’s t-shirt and old lady bloomers, best described as the most off-putting baby doll PJs yet. But that has also let me create a Cinderella-like garden full of birds and chipmunks and red squirrels. Nothing big gets in because I’ve lined the underside of the fence, where there was a gap, with dig-proof fencing.
If you want to know more about the garden, click here.
Before you think about feeding birds anywhere close enough to the house that you can enjoy watching, take the time to seal up any holes in your house foundation where mice can get in. You will get more mice: They spend their nights cleaning up after birds and making new holes to get in and out from. And you may also get rats. Not the horrors they are written up as (think bald squirrel), but still not something you want inside.