Fruits and a New Bird

Hello! My wallet never turned up, but my identity is on its way through the mail in various envelopes.

Here's the birdbath of which I spoke in the last entry.

No birds so far, that I've seen. I guess it's a little scary-looking. I may transition it to a fruit feeder for butterflies, and probably ants as well. That reminds me to tell you that I ended up throwing out my hummingbird feeder because I couldn't keep the ants off of it; it had an ant moat but that always dried up faster than I could refill it, so the ants took it over, and many of them managed to get up inside it and drown. It was impossible to clean so I decided to forget about the hummingbirds until next Spring, and I'll do it right, e.g., get the feeder out there early, make it truly ant proof, and get some bright flowers such as fuchsia to encourage them to stop by. Come to think of it; screw the feeder, I'll just focus on getting flowers that they like. That will take care of the ant issue, and apparently they like flowers better anyway.

I like talking to you because you let me ramble on forever and you never interrupt.

What else can I tell you....how about a progress report on the garden. We have lots and lots of green tomatoes.

We haven't had the slightest hint of any ripening. Apparently that usually happens in August up here, so maybe we've just got to wait a bit, but some of them have been fully formed for a couple of months and yet they're not red. I've read both that they need lots of warmth and sun to ripen, and that they need coolness and shade. So that's a quandary. If any of them start to rot, then we'll start picking them, ripe or not, and try to ripen them indoors. I can't remember how that's done but I read it on the Internets.

Serrano peppers! With a daylily in the background. I'm not a big fan of the daylilies. They need a moderate amount of water, or else the foliage starts to look like crap, and the blossoms last for about one day, then dry up and look ugly, so you have to keep pulling the dead blooms off, and at any given time only one blossom in 10 square feet is blooming. Also, I don't really like the look of lilies. Too self-conscious.


American goldfinch!

So pretty. The female has a duller yellow back and no black on her head. We've been getting a lot of them lately. Apparently they have a later nesting season than most birds, so maybe that has something to do with it. It could also be because after I cleaned up the natural disaster of mixed seed, I switched to one type of seed, sunflower. Now there are a lot fewer birds, but I think it's because the sparrows and finches that by far outnumbered any other types preferred some other kind of seed, perhaps millet. So now the birds that do come by tend to be blue jays, cardinals, or goldfinches, or some kind of woodpecker guy which I'm too lazy to look up on whatbird.com. Or squirrels. Grrrr. But at least the seed is getting eaten, rather than flung around willy-nilly and turning into goo.

I discovered that a lot of people say birdfeeders aren't good for the environment. This is disappointing. This Wall Street Journal article from 2002 explains that it's an unnatural food source so it tends to increase the numbers of certain species artificially, thus increasing competition for birds that don't stop by the feeders. It also encourages birds to be closer to humans, which isn't good for them. Plus it spreads disease and increases window collisions. And it turns out that Americans spend $2.6 billion per year on birdseed. Yes, $2.6 billion.

TTFN