Birds - Seeds and Chocolate

We feed birds year round in my neck of the woods. We have 3 tube feeders hanging from free standing wrought iron shepherd's hooks, complete with the very necessary squirrel baffles. They are placed conveniently close to our deck. When I say we feed the birds, it would be more accurate to say, my husband feeds the birds and I watch. He cleans the clumps of mooshed seeds from the feeders after heavy rains, and he is the one that treks over to the bird store for the exact blend of seed which will attract the birds he wants to feed.

Originally he was the bird watcher but I eventually came around. Now instead of saying, "hey that red bird is back, I knowledgeably say, wow look at the Cardinal." I have come a long way. I can recognize a woodpecker from a titmouse (that name always makes me feel like a 5th grader when I hear it, similar to the feeling I get when I hear about the lake in South America, Lake Titicaca), and a Chickadee from a Carolina Wren. And I can scream at the squirrels as loud as most folks when I see them encroaching on the feeders.

What I haven't figured out yet, is how the birds know when the feeders have been just filled. There have been times when we have gone away and the feeders have been left empty for days, sometimes weeks. Yet my husband is not one minute back into the house after filling the feeders, and wham, feeding frenzy in my back yard. How do they know? Do they have Clark Kent like hearing that can hear seed being poured into a feeder? And how do they let all their other bird pals know that there is an all you can eat buffet now open in my back yard?


Back in my pre-menstrual days, I could sniff out chocolate wherever it was hidden. Within an office, my instincts would kick in and I could find that last piece of lint-y chocolate wherever it was hiding. It was invariably a semi-sweet Hershey miniature, with its wrapper half stuck to the bottom of a candy dish. My insatiable need for chocolate at that particular time of the month, heightened my instincts thus closing in on sustenance.

I think birds are like that with seed, without the bitchiness of course.