Birds for breakfast.

About 6 weeks ago, I took delivery of a nice bird feeder from Amazon.com. Surprisingly, none of the local merchants had the model type I wanted. This thing is about 24" tall and features 3 different seed tubes, each about the diameter of a Campbell's soup can. I had my house keeper install it on a metal poll built for that purpose (from Lowe's) about 5 feet from my dining room window. For the first week, it got no action that I saw. Then, just after New Years, I looked out of my kitchen bay window and saw that my neighbors across the street had placed their natural Christmas tree - a five foot blue spruce - out on the curb. I had my house keeper retrieve it and stake it upright about three feet from the feeder. Moreover, I had her sprinkle seeds all into the foliage of the tree. Bam - the very next morning, there were birds feeding in the tree. Within a couple of days, they had caught on to the feeder itself. At first, I had the blinds just barely open. Over a few days, I opened them just a little more each day to habituate the birds to my presence at the dining room table. Now, I have the blinds pulled up half way. The birds tend to ignore me, so long as I move very slowly. Here's the list of birds that frequent my feeder so far. Mourning doves - about 12 to 20, morning and evening. They feed off of the ground below the feeder. There is always plenty for the ground feeders, compliments of a pair of voracious red-bellied woodpeckers who frequent the feeder all day long. Apparently, the act of pecking away bark to get at beetles and grubs is so hard wired that they will invariably stick their long beaks into the seed holes and vigorously kick out several seeds onto the ground for every one they take. Occasionally, they will actually eat the small, round seeds at the feeder. But more often, they grab a black sunflower seed in their beaks, then fly off to the nearby pulp pine border (about 6 feet behind my back fence) and wedge the seeds into the bark of various trees for later consumption. Right now, there is a flock of some small member of the finch family that looks like a compact model of a house sparrow. Having found this steady source of food, they have delayed their farther southward migration and fattened up for a couple of weeks now. There is a pair of cardinals every day. Blue jays show up several times daily - usually four at one time. Boat-tailed grackles occasionally swoop in and run all the other birds off. Of course, when the neighborhood murder of 6 crows pop over the fence, the grackles bug out too. I once saw an eastern blue bird perched atop the pole. They don't eat seeds. I think he was intrigued by the holes in the tubes. I went out after that and bought a nice cedar blue bird house ($10.00 at Lowe's) and attached it to the fence at the other end of the yard. No tenants so far. Now and then, a pair of red-winged black birds show up. I had robins one day, but they continued on south the next day. I don't think they were after the seeds so much as looking for worms and insects in the grass. I came home one afternoon and found the bird feeder absolutely mobbed by a flight of migrating cow birds. They are about the size of a red-winged black bird. The female is a uniform, mousy brown. The male has that same brown on his head, but his body is black with shimmering blue-black wing feathers. There must have been 50 of them. They virtually cleaned out the feeder then flew on farther south. Strangely, I have not seen any of the several other varieties of finches that migrate through here. At any rate, I enjoy watching them up close. It's really quite inexpensive to maintain a good bird feeder. Try it - you'll like it.