One day, my sister and I were outside picking up trash from our mostly-bare lawn.
The next day, I was watching birds flock to the feeders and go after the seeds I’d just scattered on a blanket of fresh snow. Late winter weather in the Mohawk Valley is nothing if not changeable.
The warmer temperatures we’d had for a few days were a welcome change from some of the frigid ones that made getting ready for my daily trips to the bird feeder a bit of an ordeal. When the snow was deep or the yard was icy, I’d put on snowpants, boots, extra vest, coat, hat and mittens, set cans of sunflower seeds into a carrier and balance it on a snowbank outside the back door. Then I’d toss out my snowshoes, shove my boots into them, snap the fasteners and plod off to make my delivery.
The trips to the feeder were a daily task – in a large part because the birds aren’t the only ones enjoying a free meal.
We also have squirrels – a lot of them.
And while I try to make sure there’s plenty of seed on the ground for them and the birds that prefer ground feeding, there is always at least one squirrel wanting to gorge itself from the seed in the supposedly squirrel-resistant feeder.
The feeder has been around for awhile and the mechanism that closes off the seed compartments when anything heavier than a bird lands on a perch is not as effective as it once was. Any squirrel who doesn’t mind eating while hanging upside down clinging to the shepherd’s crook from which the feeder hangs can get a free meal.
I sometimes yell and bang the back door, which sends the offending squirrel and its buddies fleeing, for a short time anyway.
But while we enjoy seeing the chickadees, cardinals, juncos, blue jays, woodpeckers and other birds that come to visit our feeding station, the squirrels also provide entertainment.
One day I looked out to see a gray squirrel feeding on the ground, but his tail looked decidedly orange in color.
My sister was visiting that day. “Does that tail belong to that squirrel?” I asked.
We both watched. The squirrel moved and the fluffy orange tail went with it.
A hybrid? —
There is also a black squirrel that comes around sometimes and one with so little fur on its scruffy-looking tail that we briefly wondered if it was a rat.
My sister and I rigged up a hanger and hung a seed cake in our apple tree. It was gratifying to see a chickadee checking it out, but within a day or two I spotted a squirrel running back and forth on the tree limb, studying the situation. It eventually jumped onto the seed cake, which rolled and tumbled him to the ground.
Squirrels don’t give up easily, however. I looked out one day to see him on the seed cake, gorging himself. It wasn’t long before the cake landed on the ground and quickly disappeared.
Warmer temperatures had the snowpack melting bit by bit. I made some trips out to the yard without the snowshoes and took walks along the road, picked up trash and poked at the ice buildup in the creek that runs through our property.
Snow returned, but I left the snowshoes behind when I trudged out to feed the birds.
I heard the trilling call of a red-winged blackbird as I made my way across the yard. Despite all appearances to the contrary, spring really is on the way.
Donna Thompson lives outside Mohawk in the house where she grew up. She is a graduate of Mohawk High School, Herkimer County Community College and Utica College and recently retired after 40 years at the Times Telegram in Herkimer, working most of that time as a reporter and columnist. She is enjoying having more time to spend with family and hopes to get the interior of the house in shape before it’s time to plant the vegetable garden. “We’ll see,” she says.
