bottle-blonde: June 2008

I had an ingenous idea for buildng a bird feeder out of scrap wood and hardware that I had in my apartment. It took a little while to put together, paint and install, but in the end I thought that it looked pretty damn good. I used laundry hooks from Home Depot to hang the feeders from and left over Ikea hardware from furniture that I had bought to secure the scraps of wood together at the top of the pole. It was my theory that if I had a feeder like this with no big perches I would be able to keep pigeons, doves and other large birds away.

It was my hope that I would get a handful of smaller birds: finches, cardinals etc. Well, what started as a single pair of rosey house finches visting my feeder every morning and evening soon turned into a flock of twenty! In addition there were Doves. Doves although stupid as all hell are persistent if not hungry and I had four of them constantly on the porch. It quickly became apparent that this was not going to work. There were just too many birds. A deck close up to the house is not ideal for dozens of feeding birds. There was seed and poo everywhere and it was really starting to wear me out trying to keep up with it all. Then I noticed the ants had started visiting as well, a result I surmised of the seed and poo on the deck(gross). I agonized for a week if not more about taking the feeders down. I just felt so badly for the birds who had gotten so used to the them, and I worried that their clutches of babies would suffer as a result also. In the end I just had to do it. It was a process taking all that down clearing everything off of the deck to clean etc, but I got it done. Needless to say sometimes things just work themselves out. No sooner had I just gotten used to the deck being bird free than I found one DEAD and ROTTING in one of my plants! Grooooosss - on ocassion when they were feeding the birds would crash into a window, my guess is that this guy had done the same and just not made it back up into the sky (in physical form anyway). If I needed a reassureance that I had made the right decsion than that was it. One, can most certainly NOT live with dead birds just outside their door. In the end it has all worked out and my efforts putting together this bird feeder pole have not been in vain as I have realized that the hooks and the sunny location make this a perfect spot to hang bundles of herbs out on for drying!