I like birds. If I didn’t have a cat I would have a bird, a roller canary to be specific, one that sings his little heart out over nothing at all, just because he can. When we lived in a house, I had a canary and three cats. In good weather I put the canary cage outside under the patio and he did his singing there. At night and in the colder weather his cage stayed in the spare bedroom I used as an office. I suspended it on a swag lamp chain where the cats couldn’t get to it. The bird sang there too. I loved hearing him.
In our little apartment now there is not room for both a cat and a canary. My intention was to get myself a canary when our last cat died, but by the time Tigs was gone, Squeaky had already become a member of the family. Since she is likely to outlive me, a canary just is not in the cards for me. Perhaps that is why I am so solicitous of the outside birds.
In our front yard, visible to us through sliding glass doors, we put out suet blocks, seed bells, millet sprays, hummingbird “juice” and even water for a drink or a dip. But even with all those goodies, I am a tinch disappointed in the limited variety of birds that come to feed. Of course we get hummers and various sparrows and pretty little house finches. We have a lone resident phoebe but since phoebes eat bugs, he pretty much stays out on the rooftop out of sight waiting for gnats to fly by. Once in a blue moon we will get a female oriole come for a taste of the hummingbird juice, but obviously it isn’t her favorite place to eat.
For the last three years we have had a pair of black-headed Grosbeaks come in the spring. Usually they show up the third week of April and stay until their baby is able to come to feed at the seed bell. We usually get a couple of peeks at him and then they head out for their next stop. This year the pair were here for about two weeks and then disappeared. It was very disappointing, as these are the only colorful birds we get. In the winter the cute white-crowned sparrows mingle in with the regular sparrows, but in spring they head north for the bay area. So our bird population, insofar as what we can see from our front yard, is very small. We don’t even get mockingbirds!
To be honest with you, I have only told you about the birds that I like. This year we have had starlings, which are exceptionally uninteresting birds. We have lots of crows, who are only good for making a racket as far as I am concerned. And then we get a hawk once in a while. When I see it sitting in the big tree out in front, I run out like a crazy woman and try to shoo it away, flapping my arms and saying, “Not MY birds!” The hawk is pretty good about minding me.
In January of our second year here our complex was visited by a flock of about 12 or 14 cattle egrets. These egrets aren’t very pretty but they were fun to watch. They would slowly walk across the lawns in search of interesting tidbits. We could even sit on the porch and watch them nibble by; our presence didn’t disturb them much. I don’t know where they went at night. Maybe to find some cattle. During the day if the flock wasn’t in front of our house, we could count on them being on down the road a bit on someone else’s lawn. By May they were finished with us and moved on. They have never come back.
It’s fun to watch birds. Right now the sparrow babies are just about big enough to be on their own. Sometimes the way they carry on, fluttering their wings and opening their mouths while they hunker down into a soft ball on the ground trying to get their parents’ attention, you’d think that they are still quite dependent. But if food doesn’t come quickly, they shrug their shoulders and set out to find their own seeds, of which there are plenty around.
The down side of all this bird business is that we tend to track a lot of seed hulls into our house. But that is a small price to pay for the enjoyment it gives us to watch all the critters big and small who know they can depend on the Title family for their next meal.
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