Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Bird Feeder Yard!

The rest of the updates from San Francisco, with pictures, will be coming shortly (probably right after this!), but I wanted to give a little update about our bird feeder yard!

We are in a bird feeder arms race against our neighbors. We put up one, then observed them up a ladder adding more suet feeders to their tree, and... well... considering that we have eight feeders and two bird baths now, I think you can guess what happened.

We now have some regulars frequenting our feederfest, so I wanted to introduce them!

This is Chacha, the female downy woodpecker, demonstrating proper use of the tail plate on the suet feeder:


A male downy also visits our feeders, but I don't see him as often and have yet to get a photo, so he doesn't have a name yet.

This is one of our yet-to-be-named chickadees. Andrew is voting Cockapoo, but understandably I am reluctant:


They are bold, sort of bratty, wonderful birds. They are some of the smallest who come to the feeders, and they absolutely terrorize everybody else. They stole a piece of apple from the platform feeder, hid in the tree and spent most of the afternoon eating it:


Looking cocky (can you tell I like our chickadees?):



Here are Debby and Dale, our Eurasian Collared Dove pair that appears to be nesting on the eaves of the house across the street:


This is Goldfinger and Pussy Galore, the Lesser Goldfinch couple who monopolize our thistle sock most afternoons:


And this is Randy and Jolene, a house finch pair who also love our thistle sock and sometimes sit out at our platform:


And this is Sanjay, our scrub jay who waits for Andrew to put out peanuts in the morning and then spends the next few hours stealing them one by one. He does a lot of screaming while he is at the feeder, grabs a peanut, disappears for a while, then comes back and repeats until all of the peanuts are gone.


We are hoping to draw in some robins, so we've increased the dry mealworms we have in the feeder, and have also added some raspberries and blueberries. One can dream?

(This is like playing Viva Pinata with birds. And it's AWESOME).

No comments:

Post a Comment

Search This Blog