Archive for October, 2009
Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches might be one of my dietary staples, but I wouldn’t want to live on PB&J alone. Every once in a while it’s refreshing to fix a BLT or an egg salad sandwich for lunch. Humans aren’t the only creatures that appreciate some variety in their diet. Bird seed is a culinary mainstay for our feathered friends, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t mix things up. Try filling your decorative bird feeders with seed and hanging a suet feeder nearby.
Suet is really just a fancy word for rendered animal fat, and for whatever reason it drives woodpeckers, chickadees, jays and many other birds crazy. You can dress up a block of suet by adding delectable morsels to send birds into a feeding frenzy. Try adding some peanut butter, some chopped apples and raisins. Then sit back and watch as the birds come flocking to your backyard.
The winter bird count is one of the marquee events for our local Audubon Society chapter. It doesn’t draw as many participants as the summer count, nor does is it as highly anticipated as the potluck dinners, but the winter count provides local bird watchers with hard data about nearby bird populations. Early in December, I and other amateur ornithologists leave our warm, cozy households and venture out into the snow.
We might take a quick glance at the rustic bird houses hanging in the yard to see if any birds are hiding inside, out of the harsh elements. The key is to spread out, with every bird watcher driving to a different part of the neighborhood and making a tally of each unique species encountered. At the end we make a master list of all the birds that have been counted and compare it to previous years.