Dorie’s Different Reality

I haven’t blogged about the birdies lately. It’s been so odd weatherwise, the poor things don’t know if they’re coming or going. Last week, it was nearly 70 degrees. It felt like Spring! And then today it’s mid-thirties, with a wind chill in the 20’s and ice all over the place. A few days ago, I saw the big flock of Grackles that I associate with “February Thaw” A few dropped by the bird feeder when they realized there was good stuff there. Most of the flock stayed down in the cornfield behind us and enjoyed the goodies on the ground there. We get some big, fat Doves around here-probably from scrounging around barns for dropped feed. Some people eat doves and I understand it’s open season on them all the time, but nobody I know hunts. We’ve had two different species of woodpecker dropping by all Winter: the little Downy Woodpecker (shown in the neato pic here) and the larger, Red Bellied Woodpecker. The Red Bellies have a nice song and I always hear them coming. They seem to be a bit shy, but when they finally arrive, they’ll chase away all challengers until they’re good and ready to relinquish the suet cake! Then we have all the usual little guys: House finches, Chickadees, Nuthatches, Juncos and the Tufted Titmouse (say that one 3x fast!) We have some little Brown Wrens that like us. I like them because they eat earwigs! Sometimes they like us a little too much. Now and then I’ll hear fluttering and the dogs start going nuts and I’ll find a wren in the house- coming in through the dog door downstairs. Once, I had to liberate one who got his foot caught in a mousetrap! It was awful- but he flew away (with a sore foot, I bet) I’ll see Cardinals now and again, but not the way we have in years past. Either they’re staying down in Virginia where it’s warmer, or they just don’t like the safflower seeds I’m offering this year. Most birds like them, and the squirrels don’t so they don’t get to raid the birdseed the way they will with peanuts and sunflower seeds. I still see them (squirrels-the fur bird!) out on the deck and wonder why they aren’t hibernating? Maybe they can’t sleep with all the weather changes.

A funny thing happened on the way to making this blog entry. I wanted to find some “free to use” pics of some of the birds mentioned here. (Since they never seem to want to pose nicely for me!) So I googled “free bird images” and gosh- all these Lynyrd Skynyrd references start popping up! No, not that Free Bird!

I have a lonely SharPei jumping up on my arm at the moment. I’m going to go see what’s up in the canine world now.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2008 at 2:27 pm and is filed under Birds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.