Birds
I haven't posted about my birds in a while. And when I did, I think it was on my other journal (which is now inactive). I love my birds. We fed them religiously for a while. Sometimes the weekly bird food bill would be fifty dollars! Yes... weekly. But we didn't mind because we loved seeing them.
Then moths got into the bird food and let me just say that maggots caused by moths are no less gross than maggots caused by flies. The situation was quickly dealt with as soon as we discovered it but we still find quite a few moths around. We have a jihad against moths in our house now. So as a result of this, we stopped feeding the birds for a while. I wouldn't allow any more bird food in the house and there isn't really a place to store it outside of the house because of all of the rain we get.
We've started feeding them again because they now sell larger quantities of the bird food in plastic bins (think pickle barrels) that seem to be moth proof. We are only doing the ground feeder and the fat balls though. We aren't feeding the finches anymore (we used to get green and gold). I'm not worried about them though because everyone around here feeds the finches. We used to do the hanging feeders for them but the squirrels keep breaking them by hanging off of them and eating out of the small holes. I know that the squirrels still eat out of the ground feeder and that doesn't bother me. I don't mind feeding them as they have to eat too, it was the breaking of the other feeders that was so annoying and expensive. Though I will admit some of their acrobatics were funny to watch:
Now the only real complaint is that the starlings sometimes take over the yard and scare off some of the other birds. They rarely come in groups of less than 20. But they are funny and gregarious birds. And pretty too. But my favorites are the house sparrows which are so tenacious and cute, the wrens and robins with their little spindly legs and the tits which love the fat balls. We get coal tits, blue tits and great tits. We also get plenty of collared doves, blackbirds, chaffinches, dunnocks, magpies and even an occasional pheasant:
Boy are they loud!! We used to get a lot of wood pigeons, but not so much anymore. They used to be one of my favorites too so I hope they start coming back.
Then moths got into the bird food and let me just say that maggots caused by moths are no less gross than maggots caused by flies. The situation was quickly dealt with as soon as we discovered it but we still find quite a few moths around. We have a jihad against moths in our house now. So as a result of this, we stopped feeding the birds for a while. I wouldn't allow any more bird food in the house and there isn't really a place to store it outside of the house because of all of the rain we get.
We've started feeding them again because they now sell larger quantities of the bird food in plastic bins (think pickle barrels) that seem to be moth proof. We are only doing the ground feeder and the fat balls though. We aren't feeding the finches anymore (we used to get green and gold). I'm not worried about them though because everyone around here feeds the finches. We used to do the hanging feeders for them but the squirrels keep breaking them by hanging off of them and eating out of the small holes. I know that the squirrels still eat out of the ground feeder and that doesn't bother me. I don't mind feeding them as they have to eat too, it was the breaking of the other feeders that was so annoying and expensive. Though I will admit some of their acrobatics were funny to watch:
Now the only real complaint is that the starlings sometimes take over the yard and scare off some of the other birds. They rarely come in groups of less than 20. But they are funny and gregarious birds. And pretty too. But my favorites are the house sparrows which are so tenacious and cute, the wrens and robins with their little spindly legs and the tits which love the fat balls. We get coal tits, blue tits and great tits. We also get plenty of collared doves, blackbirds, chaffinches, dunnocks, magpies and even an occasional pheasant:
Boy are they loud!! We used to get a lot of wood pigeons, but not so much anymore. They used to be one of my favorites too so I hope they start coming back.