Looking Out: Avian and mammalian visitors can entertain
Watching birds has long fascinated my beloved wife, Marsha, and me. That doesn’t mean we are ardent birders, sneaking around through the woods and swamps with binoculars, keeping a life list.
Nope. We are armchair bird people. As long as we’ve been married, we have had bird feeders and all kinds of flowers planted to attract butterflies and birds. We’ve become relatively proficient at identifying the usual visitors. We are fortunate to have a neighbor who is an ornithologist to help sort out the strangers.
There are gaps in our knowledge, mostly centered around LBB’s and ducks. Most Little Brown Birds are easily identified as LBB’s and ducks are ducks, no matter if our ornithologist friend says they are Carolina wrens or pine siskins. LBB’s.
We are not alone in our ignorance.
The other day my friend Sigmund told me a great story about a former colleague named Leonard. Leonard had grown up in New York City. He knew nothing about birds, so Sigmund and the others in their office decided to teach him.
The first day they were fortunate to spot a blue jay sitting on a tree branch outside the window.
Leonard’s life list: 1.
The next day, Leonard was all excited when he arrived at work, as he had just seen a bird in a tree by the parking lot.
“That blue jay we saw yesterday?” he said.
“Yes?” said Sigmund. “What about it?”
“Do they come in red, too?” asked Leonard.
One of the mixed-blessing parts of feeding birds is that one also ends up feeding mammals. While it is hard to think of graceful and beautiful cedar waxwings or most other birds as hogs, they are not tidy at mealtime.
Deer, raccoons, chipmunks, voles, mice, opossums and even the occasional skunk will be drawn to the feeders, mostly to feast on the seeds dropped by the sloppy birds. They leave tracks in the snow, the occasional broken bird feeder, and cone-shaped holes dug by the skunks in search of a little grub meat to augment their seed feed.
When I look out at my feeders, I mostly see two types of mammals.
Squirrels, in abundance, and my beloved wife, Marsha, out there chasing the squirrels away from the feeders.
It is a shame that they do not understand English. Marsha is articulate and agile, accompanying her verbal warnings with a lot of hand clapping and foot stomping. “Go away squirrel! You don’t belong here! Now just shoo, you squirrel you!”
They don’t bother me too much, other than costing a bunch in extra birdseed. It is fun to watch their acrobatics as they master assaults on our feeders. It is entertaining to see the little red squirrels chase the much larger gray squirrels and fox squirrels.
In sympathy with Marsha, I have tried a number of ways to discourage them. I have oiled, waxed and greased the poles that hold the feeders. Our main feeder has gates that close the openings if a heavy squirrel sits on the perch.
They simply hang by their back toes from the hook on which the feeder hangs and chow down, upside down without touching the triggering perches.
All of the nervous herky jerky red squirrels that visit our yard are named Don, for Don Knotts. The gray squirrels in our area are all black. The fox squirrels have such lovely tails that we have a painting of one of the critters hanging on our wall.
No, they don’t bother me too much, with one exception.
I just hate it when they laugh at us.
Jim Whitehouse lives in Albion.
This article originally appeared on The Daily Telegram: Jim Whitehouse: Avian and mammalian visitors can entertain
