Birding

This term, birding, at least to me, is a relatively a new term for a hobby of studying and bird watching. This my impression.

When I was living in Wisconsin many of us had bird feeders, and we would be watching to see which type of bird was feeding there. Most of us had two types of feeders, one for humming birds and the other for all of the other birds. The humming bird had to have a special liquid feeder that held a syrup. Then this was colored red to attract the humming bird, The other feeder had the sun flower seeds which all the other birds seem to enjoy.

In Wisconsin our challenge was to locate the feeders out of reach of the black bears. They loved both of them, and they would even destroy the feeders just to get at the food. Now in Illinois that is not a problem, so birding is much more enjoyable.

At our first feeder we had a pleasant surprise when the first birds arrived. They were the American golden finch. They were rare in Wisconsin, but here we had 3 or 4 or even 5 at one time. Very pretty site, When the weather became colder, the yellow birds disappeared. We had plenty of birds, but I assumed that they went south. Several months later after a little research, my son Rick discovered that they changed coats for the winter and become brown and white, so they were still with us Now we are waiting for them to start to change back to yellow.

We had so much bird traffic at the first feeder that we needed to put up another. And now do we have birds. We have cardinals,mourning doves, juncos, chickadees,nut hatch, woodpeckers just to name few. Surprising we can have all of them at one time. They also come in large numbers,like 6 cardinals, 16 mourning doves, numerous juncos, also many sparrows. The red headed woodpeckers come in different sizes, and they are very flighty. The tiny chickadees take one seed, and then fly to a tree near by. There they peck on the seed to crack open the shell. They really work hard to get out that morsel inside. Then they fly back to get another seed, and do it all over again.

My son, Rick is buying bird seed in 35 pound bags, because the birds are eating about 1 pound per day. It seems to me that we are the only people feeding the birds. It might be the sign of the current times where you have to feed your family first.

If you can feed the birds, you will find it very entertaining,and you will be aiding the trees as well. After all this is in God's plan as well.