Backyard Birds Dining

We encourage birds to visit us. We have two seed tubes hanging from a bottlebrush outside the kitchen window. I fill them with Deluxe Blend from Wild Birds Unlimited. It has seeds for the birds that can sit on the feeders' perches and seeds they don't care for that they throw down to the birds that eat on the ground.

Here are the seed tubes above a bunch of plants that have sprouted from the fallen seed that the ground feeders missed.
It's fun to watch the birds eating and fighting over the best perches. It gets quite raucous at times.

We also have an oriole feeder and hummingbird feeder. The orioles and hummers get sugar water and the orioles also get grape jelly. They eat mostly the jelly (the sugar water never goes away). The orioles are back and I saw my first one today. I got a picture from the dining room through the living room window. They're skittish birds so it will be tough getting better pictures. I tried. I sat on the floor by the window and held the camera up against the window and watched the display on the back of the camera. The bird never came back and my arms got tired. I'll try again when there are more birds coming to the feeder. It's early in the season for orioles.
The orioles really like the bottlebrushes when they're in bloom. I guess the flowers are full of nectar. The bushes in the front yard are spectacular when they're in bloom. That's when the orioles are abundant.

Last week Jerry saw an egret in the back yard that was eating a gopher. Yesterday it was back eating another gopher. I whipped out my trusty Kodak digital camera and filmed it from the bedroom. I didn't know that egrets eat rodents. I figured they were fishers and grazers. We need to get more egrets to visit...we've got a lot of gophers.

We have a couple of birdbaths. One is made out of plastic and the other is concrete. Lately, crows have been using the concrete one a lot. It's stable enough for them to sit on. The plastic one teeters under their weight so they leave it alone. The crows use it mostly to wash their food. They wash their food a lot while we're eating supper. They're taking care of the rodent population. I face the birdbath when I'm eating. It's something that can make a person lose his appetite if he weren't fascinated by the birds.

Prepare to lose your appetite.

Here are a couple of movies I took of the birds eating. The first one shows the seed eaters and and includes the oriole picture above. The movie continues with the egret downing the gopher then ends with a crow ripping apart another gopher (or bunny or squirrel?) on the birdbath.


(The clanking during the egret segment is Jerry rearranging the kitchen.)

The egret came back today and was eating another rodent. It's probably another gopher but it sure looks big for a gopher. I filmed this one from the bedroom window again. It's a lot like the egret in the first movie but it got spooked and flew to a higher perch that was closer and less obstructed. It's rather long (four and a half minutes) so you probably don't want to watch it all but you might want to watch the first minute to see it take off. (I need to remember to paste in a blank frame at the beginning. The video compression Google uses makes the beginning of the movie an ugly smudge without it.)


Here's the first egret holding its dinner.


Ain't nature grand?