HERD ABOUT IT? by Ana Grarian: I have a new tree outside my window. Well, not exactly a new tree. My desk has been moved to another room so I am looking at another tree, outside a different window. At first I was not very happy about this. My old tree was big, and so full of branches you couldn’t see the street and houses through it, and it was full of wrens and sparrows. The new tree, is really just the ends of long draping branches overlooking the neighboring houses. It doesn’t provide the sense of living in the woods. BUT! The limb from this tree is so much closer, I am able to reach out and hang suet feeders within arms length of my desk. Now I have birds coming to feed just a few feet from my window sill.
Mostly it’s just been starlings, but I have had a woodpecker and a jay, and no squirrels! (yet) It’s new and the birds are very sensitive to my movements. Just about the time I get my phones camera ready, they hear me, and flit away. The Downy Woodpecker has visited twice while I was on the phone and the Blue Jay while I was moving furniture. This photo is pretty fuzzy, but I’ll do better.
Hey honey – if you are looking for your camera – it’s probably on my window sill!
If squirrels can get in there, they will. Dexterity is their motif, and clever a constant companion. If the human race goes extinct, I vote on squirrels as eventually being one of the most sentient creatures left.
I’m really surprised the squirrels aren’t getting at this feeder. I haven’t even seen them try, and they use this tree to get to and from the roof of the house next door. Possibly out at the ends of these drooping branches they can’t hang on.