In my backyard busy bees have now been replaced by busy birds. I haven’t seen any grackles for weeks, so I figured it was safe to put up the rest of my feeders. It’s been standing-room-only since. In fact when I was filling a couple of the feeders the nuthatches and chickadees kept trying to land on my head. They aren’t going to let anyone get in the way of important seed caching.
One White-breasted Nuthatch has been particularly entertaining. There is wire mesh on the bottom of my hopper feeders to let rain and melting snow drain out. The nuthatch lands on the feeder and then jumps underneath and hangs by his feet and drills for seeds from underneath. The birds feeding on top don’t appreciate it, but it makes me laugh.
Of course every time I come near the window with my camera, he jumps topside and pretends nothing ever happened.
