Today's first customer
Getting their calories topped up from the fatballs I've festooned my feeder-column with. Cold and persistent rain eventually gets through their plumage and then maintaining body temperature gets difficult. Naturally calorific food isn't easily gleaned in the winter's deepest biting times, so this is the toughest time of year for these vegetarian birds' survival. Oddly enough today's first trio of cushats ignored a fresh fill of peanut kernels, which they usually wolf down as fast as I can top it up.
Decades past in my youth when I was a regular wildfowler and pigeon shooter, I remember being asked to keep pigeons off five acres of kale at Ceres when I lived there - when pigeons are pitching in by the dozen regardless of a human's presence you can take it they're desperate. Many were too weak to fly away and could be picked up by hand. I couldn't be there constantly and soon the snow between the kale rows was littered with little grey feathered bundles of bones. Foxes cleared some away but there was virtually no meat on them by that point so many were left to be picked over by crows.
It's said that these times refine the bloodstock so only the fittest survive to breed again, but it's hard to reconcile the waste unless you harden yourself against it. Not so easily done.
Today's first customer
Getting their calories topped up from the fatballs I've festooned my feeder-column with. Cold and persistent rain eventually gets through their plumage and then maintaining body temperature gets difficult. Naturally calorific food isn't easily gleaned in the winter's deepest biting times, so this is the toughest time of year for these vegetarian birds' survival. Oddly enough today's first trio of cushats ignored a fresh fill of peanut kernels, which they usually wolf down as fast as I can top it up.
Decades past in my youth when I was a regular wildfowler and pigeon shooter, I remember being asked to keep pigeons off five acres of kale at Ceres when I lived there - when pigeons are pitching in by the dozen regardless of a human's presence you can take it they're desperate. Many were too weak to fly away and could be picked up by hand. I couldn't be there constantly and soon the snow between the kale rows was littered with little grey feathered bundles of bones. Foxes cleared some away but there was virtually no meat on them by that point so many were left to be picked over by crows.
It's said that these times refine the bloodstock so only the fittest survive to breed again, but it's hard to reconcile the waste unless you harden yourself against it. Not so easily done.