Backyard Buffet

I could spend hours watching (and listening to) the birds at our feeders in the yard. Especially this time of year when the cold weather brings so many different varieties. They eat all day long and some of them are so fat I'm surprised they can fly. At one given time you can look out the kitchen window and see tiny black-capped chickadees flitting from one feeder to another, the adorable gray tufted titmice with their big black eyes and spiky crowns on their heads. Bright red male cardinals and their mousy brown females, white-throated sparrows, bronze colored grackle with iridescent blue heads, grosbeaks and finch, warblers and the obnoxious and noisy, pesky starlings that are also iridescent with purples and greens and blues, but sometimes take over the yard.

The red-breasted nuthatch are so cute with their black eyeliner that extends from their pointy beaks over their eyes and onto the side of their heads. They have pale orange colored bellies and hang upside down to eat. The red-bellied woodpecker is one of my favorites and I hung a special feeder just for him and he's the only one that feasts there. It's actually a corn feeder for a squirrel, but I've never once seen a squirrel climb up there to eat. My woodpecker does though. I put a cob of corn there and within a week he'll strip the entire cob clean. Why they call him a red-bellied woodpecker I'll never know because his belly is white and it's his head that is bright red. His back and wings are black spotted.

The mourning doves cover the ground and catch all the seed that falls from the feeders, and after they're done eating they fly up into the branches of the trees and coo to each other. All the birds sing their beautiful songs to me, thanking me for their feast.