Saturday morning coffee… It’s damp on the back porch this morning. Overnight some rain has already fallen. Thunder rolls in from the southeast promising more to come. A look at radar shows a long band of thunderstorms wrapping around us… Believe it or not, we can use the rain. When I mowed the other day, it was the dust and not the clippings that were the biggest hazard.
I just heard a rooster crow somewhere near. I mention it because when we first moved here it was a common sound to hear of a morning. Not so much now… I can’t remember when I last heard one.
We were scraped by one of the edges just now. Fat, heavy drops of rain hitting the edge of the concrete, starting out as big, round, wet circles scattered along a band a foot deep… Becoming a darker gray band of demarcation from dry porch to wet world.
The thunder has now moved off, it is still a presence in th morning just not the primary one. The morning symphony of birdsong is coming to the fore. The peacocks around the corner have started their calls for help…help…help. A train whistle cuts the morning as thunder echoes. And a cardinal sings…
And coffee calls…
Originally Posted to Facebook
Thunder and lightning galore here, and occasional bouts of real rain, aka downpour. My great birding thrill is that I finally had a male cardinal arrive at my little feeding platform. What to do? I didn’t want to bring back the pigeons with seed. The solution? When I hear the cardinal chipping, I run out with a handful of shelled pecans. The cardinal and the bluejays are happy, the pigeons are frustrated, and the nuts usually are gone before the sparrows figure out what’s going on!
Once I came in it really let loose here and hasn’t really stopped all morning. But after the last three weeks, I’ll just enoy a cool, rainy day on the porch.
Call me perverse, but I actually prefer the coloration of the female cardinals, and after watching a few this year, I think the youngsters look pretty sharp in their almost buff grey suits with very little red… I am very lucky to be pulling in cardinals from about 20 acres to my two feeders… front and back porches.
I was using a tube feeder for the longest and fighting off sparrows constantly. I have switched to the wire boxes and blocks of seed and haven’t seen much of a loss of anything but the sparrows. Even the doves will sit on top and try to figure out how to reach through the wire and eat, all of the perching birds have no trouble with them. If I can figure out a way to keep the multitude of squirrels away, I may try to use up some of my loose seed on a chair I have that the birds like to eat seeds off of…