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May. 6th, 2004 01:22 pmThanks for the fun-connections comments. I heard more info and deemed it best to delete the whole thing. Ah, oops.
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I’m becoming a crazy bird lady. At this year’s Earth Day volunteer clean up at work, I chose a corner of the parking lot to clean where I’d been observing a small band of sparrows, the only songbirds around this industrial neighborhood. I admire their pluck. They have parking lots and gas stations and weeds and a freeway for their home territory, with one big vacant overgrown lot nearby for wildness. They chirp and sing and remind me that the woods are there, waiting for me to find them. I cleaned the corner of the lot, and trimmed but left many dog anise weeds/natives there. They are excellent bird habitat (butterflies, too). As I come and go from the parking lot, when no one is looking, I throw birdseed down near the anise. I now have bird seed in the back of the station wagon at all times. This morning, there was a mourning dove poking around. Lovely!
For 2 weeks, one sparrow has been loudest of them all, singing out that wherever it is he is perched is HIS, and all the other sparrows had better stay out of it. It took me several round trips AM/PM to locate him, perched on top of a traffic light on a curved pole over a three-lane street. I stopped to watch him, finally, and figured out what he’s up to. Unlike all the other traffic lights, this light is missing an end cap on the curved support pipe, which is horizontal at the top. He and his mate are building a nest inside the pipe, over the 3 lanes. This is not going to end well. Poor little stupid bird-brained critters. Of course he thinks he's the best, most resourceful sparrow there ever was, finding an unoccupied hollow branch like that; of course he's singing the loudest; who wouldn't with a find like that?
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I’m becoming a crazy bird lady. At this year’s Earth Day volunteer clean up at work, I chose a corner of the parking lot to clean where I’d been observing a small band of sparrows, the only songbirds around this industrial neighborhood. I admire their pluck. They have parking lots and gas stations and weeds and a freeway for their home territory, with one big vacant overgrown lot nearby for wildness. They chirp and sing and remind me that the woods are there, waiting for me to find them. I cleaned the corner of the lot, and trimmed but left many dog anise weeds/natives there. They are excellent bird habitat (butterflies, too). As I come and go from the parking lot, when no one is looking, I throw birdseed down near the anise. I now have bird seed in the back of the station wagon at all times. This morning, there was a mourning dove poking around. Lovely!
For 2 weeks, one sparrow has been loudest of them all, singing out that wherever it is he is perched is HIS, and all the other sparrows had better stay out of it. It took me several round trips AM/PM to locate him, perched on top of a traffic light on a curved pole over a three-lane street. I stopped to watch him, finally, and figured out what he’s up to. Unlike all the other traffic lights, this light is missing an end cap on the curved support pipe, which is horizontal at the top. He and his mate are building a nest inside the pipe, over the 3 lanes. This is not going to end well. Poor little stupid bird-brained critters. Of course he thinks he's the best, most resourceful sparrow there ever was, finding an unoccupied hollow branch like that; of course he's singing the loudest; who wouldn't with a find like that?