Skip to main content

Bonus Birds

 


We have a bird feeder. We are pretty good about keeping it stocked, though sometimes I get so bothered by the mess that I don’t fill it for a week or two. Birds are messy eaters. They flick seeds away while they are trying to get down to the good stuff. Before long there are seeds all over the back porch. It will need to be swept before the feed can attract any of the critters that we don’t want to attract to our back porch (the night foragers).

Also on our back porch are pots with various plantings: potatoes, peas, and flowers. Sometimes after the potatoes, peas or whatnot have been harvested, the bird seeds will have landed in the pots and begin to sprout. We had a mystery plant growing in one of our pots this summer which we originally thought might be corn (there is corn in the bird feed). As it developed, we decided it was millet. Now the tassels of the millet have developed enough so that the birds have noticed them and are feeding off the seeds.

It is oddly satisfying seeing four or five birds perched on a stalk or the wire frame around it, feeding on the plant we didn’t plant. It’s like a bonus. We sneak a look out the window, trying not to scare them off. Finches, sparrows and other LBJ’s (little brown jobs). No, we are not great birders. I can’t always tell you what kind of bird it is that is visiting us. We just enjoy watching them. Interactions that we see as cute, the birds may see differently. They chase each other off and scold each other. Bullies. But they are so small and delicate flitting this way and that, defying gravity, that we can’t take them seriously as mean or scary. We are just big lumbering humans after all.

Watching nature be nature is emotionally satisfying. Never mind the mess; I need to get that bird feeder filled up.

 

birds flit about

gathering necessaries

autumn’s approach


Star Liner

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Empathy

  Websters defines Empathy as: “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another.” Empathy is what makes us human, though lord knows there are many humans who don’t seem to have any. A person without empathy is like a caveman, only concerned for himself. Selfish. It is a lack of community and by extension, a lack of the need for civilization. The person who lacks empathy can have a bit of community, but only with others exactly like himself. It seems like societies go through cycles of empathy and less empathy. Sometimes a single event can change the course of society. Prior to America’s involvement in WWII, the general feeling in America was not very empathetic. We had our own problems. We were still dealing with the lingering effects of the Great Depression, and had been for years. That kind of stress makes it hard to think of others. Hitler was slashing through Europe. He and his fol...
1 comment
Read more

All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu

My first experience with cyberpunk as a genre of science fiction was Neuromancer by William Gibson. Neuromancer was one of the early works that defined the cyberpunk genre. It was insanely influential. It won the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award. But for me, it just did not resonate. I had a hard time visualizing the concepts. It left a bad taste in my mouth for cyberpunk. I mostly avoided the genre. Then a couple of years ago I read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson which is cyberpunk (although some people say it is a parody of cyberpunk). Whatever, I liked it. I recently picked up All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu and it immediately became apparent to me that this was cyberpunk. Julia Z is the main character, and I think this is going to be the start of a series following her. She is a hacker (hence cyberpunk). She has got herself in trouble and so she lives on the margins, barely making it. Then a lawyer asks her for her help. His wife has been kidnapped. The ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Polar Bears and Entropy

  Extinction is a normal part of the evolution of life on our planet. You and I and all individual organisms eventually die. That is the way of things. Entropy happens. Entropy is a word from the third law of thermodynamics that basically means: things fall apart. The natural tendency is for things to become less orderly as time goes on: things break down, things erode, things rust, things wear out. Entropy is a measurement of how fast that is happening in any given system. Individual death is a natural outcome of entropy.   But an extinction is where all the members of a species are no longer living. Millions of species have gone extinct over the lifetime of our planet. There are natural background extinctions that happen continually. But sometimes there are events that trigger mass extinctions, where vast masses of species go extinct all at once (all at once in geologic terms, which might mean over the course of hundreds of years). There have been 5 mass extinctions over ...
Post a Comment
Read more