In the song written by Richard and Robert Sherman, the old lady pleads “Feed the birds, tuppence a bag…” I didn’t read the book, but I was enthralled when Julie Andrews sang those words in the 1964 movie Mary Poppins.
Feeding the birds chez nous gives us great pleasure, but the bags of sunflower, peanuts, corn and millet are thirty to fifty pounds in weight, at a cost far more than tuppence a bag. Our annual cost for birdseed is more like the bill for two of us at a fine restaurant every day for a whole week.
Outside the patio door of our dining room is the deck, the feeding station for at least a dozen species of birds that fly in for handouts. Each has a unique behaviour.
The blue jays are as raucous as their bold blue, white and black colouring. They attack our offerings of peanuts in the shell like a rude dinner guest who heaps his plate with food then hurries back to the rec’ room to watch the rest of the game.
At the opposite end of the speed scale are the cardinals. The brilliant red male arrives early at our restaurant door. He gazes left, right, up and down, as if searching for and waiting patiently for his modestly attired yellow and black date. She arrives. They dine.
The band of mourning doves arrive one by one. As if they haven’t got a clue that the day’s fresh offering of seeds is always presented in the same place every day, always in a little mound. Instead of coming directly to the table, they amble aimlessly about, pecking purposefully at nothing. Periodically, they retract their undercarriage and take a break from their labours. They eventually seem to realize that dinner is served. Shoulder to shoulder, they dine.
Our largest patrons are the three timid crows. Like British bobbies they creep about like a discreet undertaker at a funeral. They could dominate any of our other diners, but they act as if they were at the very bottom of the food chain.
To capture a sharp image of one of our band of little chickadees would take a shutter speed of 1/1000 and pre-focus on the treat they’d be flying in to get. Like a male shopper in a grocery store, they know what they want, know where it is, find it, get it, and get out the door with it.
