Snow Day February 10, 2010

The snow storm blanketing the east coast has finally made its appearance.  As I sit in my family room posting on my laptop, the snow is getting heavier.  It's like being inside a snow globe.  We live at the top of a cul de sac so  the only cars that travel our street are people who are involved in some way with the dozen homes here.  The schools are closed and this morning I have only seen one SUV turn down our street and two cars traveling the street at the top of our block.

My husband brings our bird feeder in the house each night to discourage our local raccoon population from hanging around on our deck.  This morning when he put it out, the birds were frantically hovering around him waiting not too patiently for breakfast.  We get a good mixture of avian friends enjoying the black oil sunflower seeds at our feeder, including:  tufted titmice, nuthatches, cardinals, blue jays, Carolina wrens, song sparrows, downy woodpeckers, finches, chickadees, and a very pushy flock of juncos.  We also have a pair of mourning doves that visit, but they  hang around on the ground below the deck picking though the food that has fallen from the feeder.  Occasionally they come up and gingerly try to get seeds from the feeder, but they are heavier than the other birds and they often trigger the weight thats shut the feeding compartment.  

This is the first "squirrel proof" bird feeder  we have had that actually works.  It is similar in design to our last feeder that was mounted on a post.  At the end of the feeding season we neglected to clean it and put it away.  The following fall when we planned to start feeding the birds again, we opened it up and saw that a squirrel had been living inside.  In our area, the squirrels make large nests (dreys) in the trees.  Although they often make their way into attics and chimneys, I'd never heard of one squatting in a metal bird feeder before

I hope you're snug and warm wherever you are.