The Birds

This spring we put out a bird feeder.  For the first few weeks, we were visited by many kinds of colorful birds as shown in the pictures below.  At first the feeder had to be refilled once a week.  Then it became twice a week, then three time per week, and finally every day.  We also noticed that there was no more variety, just one species and dozens of them at a time.  The evergreen trees that separate our lot from the neighbors was infested with them.  They lived in these evergreens, except when they flew to our feeder 50 yards away.  I told my family that these birds were welfare birds living on the free handout of birdseed.  Then I heard Rush Limbaugh talking about San Francisco having a huge homeless problem that they created by providing more and more soup kitchens and sleeping places.  The homeless have migrated to SF because of the abundant handouts.  That's when I realized that our birds weren't welfare birds, they were homeless birds. 

Needless to say but we no longer stock the bird feeder.  They did do something besides living in our evergreens and eating the birdfeeder dry every day.  They deposited their dropping all over the deck and the noise from the evergreens was a real racket.  Don't tell the neighbors that the bird noise was our fault.  What they don't know won't hurt them.

Click on the thumbnails to get an enlarged version.  The first picture is ducks in a row.  I looked at the lake one day and a group of ducks were swimming in line like an old picture of battleships trailing each other across the sea.