Birdbrain sees birds!

Verily, you must be the patron engineer of birds. You even name them.

The same crowd is here, 300 miles due east, gorging all day on suet and seeds. Just wondering if you have a secret for keeping the squirrels away (sorry, Kris) from the bird grub.

They stay away from the suet since I use the hot pepper kind. They've already broken and battered seed feeders with weight-sensitive outer mesh cages that slam shut over feed ports. Even with baffles over the feeders, the squirrels manage to get to them and hog all the food, knock them down. Any ideas?

Our squirrels were absent for about the last three weeks. Then they appeared yesterday also. They're welcome so long as they don't gnaw the edges of my too-expensive dome feeder. I have a rescue Peurto Rican Sato who apparently never saw squirrels before and has taken it on herself to keep them all well exercised. She even tried to follow one up a tree trunk. Didn't work worth a hoot, but it seemed to put the fear of God in that squirrel.

I name all the animals, more or less. Billy gets his name from being a Billy Bad-***, all the garter and ring snakes are named George since I can't tell them apart, and the deer are just named by characteristics (Mama, the triplets, Nasty, etc). This all started when I got too poor to afford my lithium. Hummingbirds work much better; they have enough distinguishing marks that I can usually tell them apart from year to year.

This habit kind of works out, though. A couple years back, one of the neighbors was working in his yard at the same time as me. He suddenly yelled over, "There's a snake headed your way. Kill it!" I looked over and said something like, "Oh, that's just a George." The neighbor threw up his hands and yelled to his wife that he couldn't kill the snake since it had a name and must be my pet.

Feral cats - I've been fattening cat food all winter, evidently.

Every day in KL it is 32C with a chance of rain. 365 days a year. Birds, squirrels, monkeys year round.

Believe it or not it is possible to miss having some snow.

We can let you have all you want, $26.50 a ton, FOB Pittsburgh.

Nice! I also feed my gang and, after 25 or so years, it's gotten to the point where they expect it. The doves have taken up permanent residence on my porch. The owls and hawks take their fair share....and then there's the pecking order......all of which consume roughly 400 lbs of bird seed a year.

The shrikes do a great job on the mice...! The Pileated does a great job on the house!

It's the squawking that gets me up most mornings.

Spring is on it's way! Last week we had a visit of a flock of Robins. Ether that or they were lost in all the snow. There was 30 plus on the ground at the time. Then again maybe they know something we don't. This morning is the first morning I can remember that it was above 32° F since mid November.

I used to feed the birds at my house. Rarely, I'd get a chipmunk going after the feeder but the acrobatics would win every time. The reason I quit was that it was enriching the rat population down the hillside. My neighbor had to call an exterminator to get a large one out of her attic. The rats mostly ate the mass quantities the birds would dump on the ground below the feeder. They are also pretty good at acrobatics.