Gratitude Monday: a room with a view

Because there’s something insidious in my back yard that starts attacking my respiratory system within five minutes of me stepping outside, I’ve had to limit my forays to about 30 minutes at a time, tops.

This means that I’m tackling the jungle canopy across my patio incrementally, and mostly limit my enjoyment of the greenery to looking through the patio doors.

However, I’m not exactly idle. I moved my small pots of herbs outside late last month, and last weekend I bought a couple of tomato plants, some larger pots and several bags o’ dirt, and I’ve been silently urging them on, because I definitely want homegrown tomatoes this summer.

Also, I splashed out about $125 on a free-standing pole with multiple hook-arms, a couple of squirrel-proof bird feeders and sacks of bird food. Because I love watching birds chowing down; squirrels not so much. If you want to discourage the little furry land sharks, you have to put your feeders somewhere they can’t reach, and since they can leap horizontally about eight feet, you need to place your feeders outside that distance. (Hence part of my reason for hacking away at the overgrowth.)

So far, the squirrel-proofness appears to be working. The little monster has been foraging around the patio in search of the seed I used to toss out onto the ground, but that stuff is long gone. I watched him try to jump on the pole, but he slid down, and he couldn’t reach the feeder. It was kind of amusing to witness him literally bounce against the patio door and gesticulate at me; he’s clearly pissed off that I’m no longer carpeting the back yard with food. But I care not.

In terms of feeding the birds—not sure what’s going on there. There’s one feeder of Fine Tunes and one of Nyjer seed. The other morning I saw a dove sitting on the Nyjer feeder, looking kind of surprised—not eating, just parked there. (They did love that stuff at my place in the Valley They Call Silicon, but they weren’t wild about that feeder because it’s really meant for smaller birds.) Hasn’t been back since.

And only yesterday have I seen a chickadee alight on the other feeder, but not for long. I’m hoping it’s a scout bird, and that others will twig to the fact that this is for them, and is not some perverse bird trap. Because I bought about 35 lbs of this stuff, and I would like to see some ROI.

Well, I’m betting that they’ll figure it out, even if they do seem a little slow on the uptake. And I’m grateful for having them around me once again.