Thank you, Beatles! Or, as said in Help!, Bee-ah-tles.
Right now I'm out on my "lanai" as my mother (and my dad, too) love to call my terrace. Birds are singing, and there's a rather jovial goldfinch announcing to all within earshot that he's arrived. It's funny to watch the birds at my feeder -- they each have their own personalities, as individuals and as species. The finches are rambunctious, but they seem to have ettiquette, while the chickadees are very polite; they will sit on a branch patiently and wait for whoever it is that's feeding to finish, and then they'll flutter up and munch away.
There is one kind of bird, however (I get the feeling it's this one little fellow, as others that look like him don't do this) who, when he (I suppose it could be a "she") lands he flicks the seeds about in a flailing kind of way with his beak. You can hear the seeds flying off and pattering down on the barbeque cover and the pavement. He really makes a mess.
I've also watched an unusually-polite scrub jay figure out how to eat from my suet feeder (I have two feeders -- a suet and a loose seed one). Normally scrub jays squawk at you in an attempt to elbow in on your property, given it's theirs, after all! But this one has never done that consistently; in fact, none of the scrub jays around here really do that. No, I take that back -- there were some over by my old apartment that did, but the ones over here seem to be of a different breed...so to speak!
I watched him, when I was home, over a period of several days trying to figure out how to first get to the loose seed feeder; he would usually just eat the loose seeds on the ground, but he would often pause and eye the feeders intently -- then try to eat from them. At first he'd try to flap his wings really fast and mimic a hummingbird so he could stay in one place. That didn't work all that well, of course.
He tried all sorts of things -- sitting on the wrought iron hook from which the feeders hung and then bend down -- but that was clearly awkward as well. Eventually, he learned that he could grasp the wire for the loose seed feeder with his feet and, while hanging perpendicular to it, bend up and munch from the feeder. Then, he discovered that he could also hold onto the criss-cross of thin metal pieces that create a kind of square latticework and eat from it that way.
So far, there's been no intimidation from him; he seems to neither care nor notice that other birds use it, or when I'm out there.
This past winter, I watched a crow try to figure out how to eat from that same suet feeder. He landed on a very "bendy" branch of the tree nearest it, and, after a few attempts and calculations, he figured out exactly where to stand on the branch, how wide his feet needed to be and what to do with his wings so that he could make the branch start boiging back and forth with momentum, so that he could grab a bite to eat from the suet feeder each time he got near it.
Smart little critters.
I haven't had as manny hummingbirds as of late, but when I do, I've seen another species coming around called Rufous. They look similar to the Anna's Hummingbird that was hanging around so much last year (and during that awful, awful storm). This little Rufous that comes around is quite curious; he loves to zip in, take a sip from each of the little "flowers" on the feeder several times, then he zips up to my terrace door and peers in -- first up high, then down towards a corner, then to the center, then over a bit, afterwhich he'll zip up to the bird feeders and examine those (you never know where some tasty nectar might be!) -- and then off he'll go.
The first few times I saw him flit up to the glass door, I was worried he'd fly into it, and, not wanting a dead hummingbird on my conscience, I found myself saying aloud, "No, birdie, no!" But he seemd to know what he was doing (his keen eyesight and all that), and would then fly off. (Last summer, I had on a brightly-patterened dress for work and, as I stood on the other side of my screen door and brushed my teeth while looking out, a little hummingbird surprised me by zooming up to the door -- their wings are really loud! -- clearly examining my dress with great interest -- and then, realizing he couldn't get in, or that it wasn't actually flowers -- off he went.)
They like red, and two of my windchimes have a mahogany-colored piece of wood hanging down as the wind-catcher that makes them chime; I'll watch a hummingbird sometimes examine the reddish wood with curiosity -- and then try to take a taste from it.
I did also have a squirrel I finally got to stop coming up on my terrace. I like squirrels, don't get me wrong. (Although we seem to have the "Geico Squirrels" here as well -- you know, the ones that purposely and gleefully dash out in front of your car to try to make you careen off course and crash). I did have a cute red squirrel coming around who was very polite; he'd (or she, but I'm just going to say "he") nose around without digging and would eat some of the loose seed I used to have in a pottery dish that goes under plants.
He disappeared after awhile, I believe chased off by the squirrel I named A.B. (short for Arrogant B-----d), so named because he would not only nose around in my plants, but dig things up, and one day when I was home sick, I watched him sit and gorge himself for forty minutes on the loose seed. I was worried he'd dig up my then-newly-planted sugar snap peas and my lettuce seets, so I covered them with bubble wrap in a way so that it was tight enough so he couldn't get under it, but loose enough so that air could flow.
I came home from lunch one day to find three puddles of what I realized was squirrel pee in indentations on the top of the plastic.
Eventually, I figured out that if I moved my BBQ way over to the left so that my extra can of gas was flush against the gas can attached to the grill, then shoved my planter with the lettuce flush against the can (thus making a kind of "Γ" shape) he couldn't jump from the tree onto my terrace.
I miss the red squirrel; I remember thinking he had a very amused, bright kind of cleverness in his eyes -- like he saw getting to my terrace as a challenge, and that he was the kind of fellow who, if he were a person, liked to play well-planned, but still "polite", practical jokes on people -- or at least would have an arsenal of really good jokes and terribly bad, stinky puns that would leave you groaning in both pain and laughter.
The gray squirrel just had this big-gallooty, lead-footed, "Mine for the takin', if yer stupid enough to put it out," kind of look in his eye. I swear if he'd actually laughed, it would have been somewhat like, "Huyuck-huyuck-huhyuck!"
It was like having Chip and Dale scurrying around out there; one quite smart, the other rather far over to the not-so-smart end of intelligence.
(Did I mention my jamsime smells sublime?)
I think next year I may look into getting a gardenia plant (oh, stop your laughing, Dad! You won't need that machete just yet. You will when I decide to plant the jungle vines for privacy, however) as they apparently like the same kind of sunshine that the jasmine plants do.
I stopped in at Cornell Farms again yesterday to grab two more things, and I really spent some time loooking at all of the herbs they have -- they have a wonderful selection; I picked up what I thought was rosemary, but then, with the scent, I realized it wasn't. I looked at the tag and saw it was yellow curry. I think next year I'm going to go there for all my Herbal Needs and get some really interesting things, in addition to the "standard" things like basil, thyme, rosemary, sage.
And what I can't use up, I can just give away. That was my plan, anyway, with my "vegertababbles" as my dad's called them in jest.
Hmm...looking at my two little bamboo plants in the pottery pots, I think I'm going to need to split them again and repot them. If I don't, they'll break the pots, and I'd rather not have that happen. Perhaps I will have to order that panda my dad keeps asking about. Or the wallaby.
The thing is it's a reall pain in the ol' gluteous maximus to do so; you can't just split them like you would any other plant -- you have to saw them apart. I have a saw, and I think I know how to do it, but, bleah.
(Oh, speak of the devil! Here's A.B;. right now! He found a new way onto my terrace! The twerp! Hmm...perhaps I shall have to go to Home Depot and see if they have some kind of ... something I can use to block off the space between the concrete and the railing.)
It's promising to be an absolutely gorgeous day and weekend; I'm going over to my dad's house for dinner tonight and to see my grandmother, and it's always nice to sit out on his deck and talk and have a beer or two.
(Oh, no mourning doves as of late, but the other morning they did wake me up at 4:57 in the morning! And no Kermit since that last night of energetic ribbiting).
OK -- I need to go get something to eat. A cup of coffee can only carry you so far in the morning.
-- H
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