Another Day in the Country
It’s for the birds
© Another Day in the Country
Well, I just hefted another $25 bag of bird seed out of the trunk. When blackbirds visit my year-around feeder, they can clean it out in an afternoon.
They come in droves, it seems, squawking and making a ruckus in the backyard. It’s like a field day as they jockey for position or a family picnic with a whole bunch of relatives — everyone talking at once.
I try to identify all the cousins. The word “black” describes them, and I guess you could call it the family name. But there are so many variations.
There are red-winged blackbird and yellow-winged blackbirds, grackles, and starlings, all vying for food.
Once they’ve emptied the feeder, clean as a whistle, they are gone, and I’m in no rush to refill it. They can wait a while.
Sometimes they are waiting quite a while. I want them to forget that they just ate all the food at Pat’s house and maybe not come back for a few days.
For sure, while the blackbirds are having a heyday, other birds pretty much stay away.
Usually, I stop feeding the birds when spring comes, but this year I’ve not stopped filling the feeder.
For one thing, birds are scarcer than they used to be. For another, I like their company.
I don’t hear them as much as I used to, but I love seeing them up close and personal.
At her house, my sister has a bird feeder that accommodates a big seed block. She has a variety of other feeders, so of course she is constantly trying to outwit squirrels who think all that seed must be for them to gather up and hoard somewhere.
This winter, she added a transparent feeder that fits up against a window in her living room.
It took a bit for the birds to get brave enough to venture that close to a window. They might have been remembering that window as a favorite perch for Jess’s cat.
She moved the cat to another window, and the birds eventually deemed it safe enough to come close.
One morning, she called me.
“Pat,” she said, “there’s a baby woodpecker at the seed block.”
She was so excited.
“Sorry,” I said with big sisterly authority. “No baby woodpeckers out and about yet this time of year (February). See if you can take a picture.”
She tried, but it was tricky.
Meanwhile, I Googled “woodpeckers in Kansas” and discovered something new.
I’d seen flickers in Ramona, and that was pretty much “it” for the woodpecker family. But Jess had spied two new woodpeckers at her seed block.
One was a downy woodpecker, and the other was what we think was a yellow-bellied sapsucker. How exciting.
Talking about birds, LeeRoy showed me the other day someone he follows on TikTok called “the bird man.”
I’m not on TikTok, so I went looking for him in other venues and didn’t have any luck.
What I liked about this particular bird man was that he not only identified birds for you but also showed the difference between male and female and played their song for you!
I discovered there are a lot of “bird guys,” “bird men,” and “bird lovers” all over the internet. There’s a lot of info out there if you’re interested, but first you have to be curious.
I am somewhat heartened, but still disheartened, at how little most people know about birds.
I’m trying to remedy that with my young art students at Centre.
This year, we took on learning about starlings in third grade. In 4th grade we did collage art featuring any bird we chose to learn about.
My mother, raised as one of the original “Schubert girls” on the county line between Dickinson and Marion counties, loved birds.
When Mom eventually got her hands on a tape recorder, she loved recording bird songs. Her favorite was the mockingbird.
Who could have guessed? That bird’s song is a whole lot of bird repertoire rolled into one rather unassuming gray bird.
Meadowlarks always were the Kansas bird for me, long before I knew they’d been officially given that distinction. They also were always the first birds we saw, sitting along fence rows, singing their hearts out.
The other birds that became synonymous with Ramona were doves.
In the summer, while still living in California, if we heard a train whistle or a dove calling, we thought of Kansas and wished we were there. Now that we’re here, we still smile at both familiar calls and give thanks.
Last summer, I added another bird feeder to my yard and hung it outside my bedroom windows.
First, I hung it under the eaves on the porch, but the birds were wary and the seed mess prolific, so I moved it away from the porch and into a tree.
The other day, when the wind was blowing something fierce, I had to laugh when I saw sparrows and finches, titmice, and nuthatches determinedly clinging to the perches, pitching in the breeze.
High wind was not going to keep them from getting their fair share on another day in the country.