Thursday’s Things.......

The birds do need some trees around the area for them to perch while waiting to fly into a feeding station.  I noticed this maple seems to be working well for that.  My new camera picks up that they are house finches and you can see some of the red on one of the male birds. The feeding habits are unknown for me.  Sometimes when it starts to storm, they hurry to eat. This morning, they are just sitting there as if they are taking a rest.  My blue spruce is a better staging area for the goldfinches in the summer.  I just read on the net that the house finch has a great song that it sings.

Yesterday afternoon, I had a spurt of some energy, to go to the basement shop to see what pieces of wood were there. I don’t buy wood for a project like this. I found a square base of pine wood from the end of a shortened shelf.  I cut old lath, saved for another project and lined the edge of the board to make a tray.

I do know from experience that a roof of some kind or size does help to keep a tray from completely snowing over, so I made the roof.  The quality of wood deteriorates  at this point as I used particle board from torn apart furniture and made supports.  That won’t last for a year or two. My two horizontal support of course are different sizes but that is all I had left from the train shelf job.

The final piece was the roof that was a leftover board from a gate I made at the old place. I picked up a box of scrap wood from the old home and thus moved wood scraps to the new place. The fencing wood will last a long time.  Style-wise, I have made a modern Frank Lloyd Wright want-a-be.  It is a rough thing and yet the birds really do like it.  I guess I have been watching too much HGMT tv or I just need to start working again someday. As a side note, I did throw away that plastic tube feeder that very few birds could land on and eat.

The male and female both eat at the feeder together.  They can walk under the roof if they want, as I will have to fill this one each day.  It is nice to have it emptied before I put new feed out anyway. Walking out on the deck to fill it is not a difficulty.

The male looks a little bit out of posture but this shots shows his side coloring.  The female has not red markings but does have a more striped pattern different that a sparrow. My goal is to get a good shot of the female to share also. I do see that the juncos are feeding from this.  I am actually going to try to lure in some cardinals with chunks of my harvested sunflowers.

My mystery item tha I have yet to discussed will just be another visual tease today.  I don’t want to get into the whole story at this point with its history and its use.

Our health is better, but is a slow recovery. We have more snow on the way so we will be staying home for a few more days. Our last grocery run should last us for a while.  I can always make popcorn to live off of if we run out of food.  The next snow seems to be another heavy one. I hope the drivers around our area have leaned some lessons on how to drive in heavy snow.  We ended up with five major pile-ups in the area with a lot of out of staters contributing to the mess from the Super Bowl and traveling home.

Thank you for checking in on the blog today.