Revenge of the Birds

Have you noticed how it’s suddenly WAY lighter in the morning and the birds are getting about more? Though not this one who died last night of who knows what. We found him this morning by the ginkgo tree. Is there a bird mortuary I could call?A year ago I got a bird feeder for my birthday which I carefully filled, carried outside and hung from a tree before sort of falling down on the job. Meaning I didn’t keep up so well in the re-filling department so that now, well, they just won’t come to it.  I filled it up with fresh new birdseed after Christmas and still, even with all this ice and snow, it hangs there untouched.I think maybe they’re mad at me. Or their parents told them, “Don’t even start with that one because she’ll leave you high and dry.”But it was a regular love-fest with the avian population around here last summer. That’s when a mourning dove laid her eggs and raised not one but two sets of babies on the windowsill not six feet from where I write each day. And she liked me, she really did and felt safe with me at all times, whether entertaining her man friend or sitting her eggs or letting these unbelievably homely babies put their whole heads down her throat to eat what she had eaten ten minutes earlier.Maybe these winter birds know all the bad things I use around the house: all that Comet, all that Clorox, never mind the deadly ice-melting potions we've been scattering around over the last few weeks.I try to be like my kids who wouldn’t use these products if their lives depended on it, whose napkins are made of cloth instead of paper and who – get this – use birdseed to give traction on icy sidewalks.  I bet they’ve got cardinals by the dozens at their house, practically eating out of their hands.But I was such a good landlord to those doves and what I'm wondering is, why can’t you keep getting credit the whole way for the good things you have done in the past?That’s what’s so hard in life: the way you have to keep ON being good every single day.~ Sigh ~ Just look at this sweet mama-dove from last summer. What a contrast to the image of that little toes-up corpse at the top here! What a contrast between who we are and who we would like to be!

Come back summer! Come back soon!

Observations by the Timid

What's with the birds? When you invite them they’re suddenly nowhere to be found. I have this dandy bird feeder outside on the dogwood and NO one has come near it - except today when two poodles who tromped across the snow to have  BMs in my yard. (On MY Snow! With their master escorting them!)But seriously where ARE all the birds? Last summer I couldn’t get rid of them. They made babies on my windowsill who I had to watch for two solid months as they put their wee little heads inside their mother’s mouth and down into her stomach! Gross!I  guess I don’t understand Nature very well. OR people  who trot their dogs onto my land to do their business. It was just 6am and still pitch dark this morning though so I bet that guy thought he was totally getting away with it.Not that I’d do anything anyway. Not that I’d call out the window to her or wire  the bushes to administer  electric shocks to their delicate underparts or anything.One of my kids is fierce about dog droppings . She returns them to the family of the offending canine and says "Your dog left this in my yard"  with the sweetest smile you ever saw. If I weren’t related to her I’d be terrified of her. She really rattled this one big hefty guy who drops by the house  a lot. He came one time when she was there with our grandbaby. “Is  that  a boy or a girl?” he said pointing  a large paw at the child. “A boy,” I told him. “Kid needs a haircut!” he snorted .Now his momma was out in the deck at the time but she heard him all right-  and when she came in she walked right over with that same big old smile: “Thanks for weighing in about the baby's hair!” she said to him without a hint of sarcasm., as if what he had said were Kindness itself. And his expression: one of total confusion.Me I can’t do that. I can’t smile when I’m mad . I can’t even confront trespassers, not even the ones who stroll past, glance quick at our windows, then reach up and swipe a dozen blossoms from our hydrangea trees .I see them though. I see them because day or night, dark or light I am lurking behind the curtains. I am the  Boo Radley of the neighborhood. :-)