Oh. But I digress. Darwin and I stopped for awhile in the bird-feeder section...and found a sock feeder for finches. We had fond memories of finch feeders from Uncle Avard and Aunt Ruth's home in Bountiful back in the day. We're so uninformed about our local birds that we had no idea if hot southern Utah had finches, or not...but since the feeder wasn't very pricey, we thought we'd give it a try.
Darwin put a hook in the front porch overhang when we got home, hung up the fully-loaded sock, and...nothing. We watched in vain all of one afternoon...nada. I looked up finch habitats and found out that YES, we SHOULD have finches this far south. We fretted that maybe we hung the feeder in a bad place...after all, the cat's perch in our kitchen looks out onto the feeder. (We did that on purpose, to watch his chin chatter with excitement when he saw birds cavorting about that he couldn't do a thing about!)
The first finch that found the feeder caused OUR chins to chatter with excitement. "Hey, look! We've GOT one!" Darwin exulted.
And since that very first customer, our clientele has grown by leaps and bounds. I have labored mightily to get pics of the darn birds...but when I would even get CLOSE to the window, away the nervous Nellies would fly. Aaron set up my tripod in the kitchen so I could use the zoom lens and be more discreet...but same problem. Every time I would go to snap away, the birds would zoom off, all a-twitter. I bet I know how a celebrity stalker feels when even his zoom camera won't get the right shot. But you know I will continue to try!!!
I love seeing all the varieties of birds that frequent our little feeder. I love watching them fight with each other. Some bossy-boots birds will nip at the others and flutter at them to chase them away. Now we have so many birds feeding at our lowly little sock that we have to refill it quite often. I fear we've created a whole welfare system for these birds...they've learned that there IS such a thing as a FREE LUNCH!!!
