One Bright Side To The Winter

by capper

As I mentioned before, the past month has been pretty rough on the capper family.

There was one shining moment. Although it may seem trivial, I'm sure even Patrick at Badger Blogger would admit it was special. Like Patrick, my wife and I enjoy feeding and watching the birds, squirrels, deer and other critters that inhabit our neck of the woods.

After seeing the garage, and feeling sorry for myself for a couple of hours, I made myself get up and go out to fill all the feeders. SIDENOTE: To show how crazy we are, we have a squirrel feeder, three feeders just for the goldfinches (they love their thistle seed), a suet feeder, a bell feeder, three feeders for mixed seed and three feeders for sunflower seeds. We also have a ground feeder and a small trough for corn to keep the deer, raccoons and turkeys from the other feeders. In the spring we will put out our oriole feeder, our hummingbird feeder, and two other feeders that Santa gave us.

Anywho, as I was filling the feeders, the birds, who we hadn't been able to feed for three weeks, were rather hungry, and became quite noisy and active, encouraging me to move faster. As I was doing the sunflower seed feeders, two chickadees were bouncing from branch to branch just a few feet above me, chiding me that I still wasn't going fast enough. Kiddingly, I grabbed a handful of sunflower seeds and held my hand out saying, "OK, if you're than hungry, come and get it."

To my surprise, one of them made several passes at my hand, but veered off at the last moment. It got so close I could feel the wind from its wings. The second one was a bit braver. It took one pass before coming back and settling on my index finger. It looked at me for about ten seconds, gave out a series of chirps, took a seed and flew back up to the tree to eat.

Like I said, it was a trivial moment in the grand scheme of things, but it was enough to bring a smile to my face and give me enough strength to carry on. To have such a small creature put enough faith in me to trust me to eat out of my hand, well, that did a lot to help me pick myself up, emotionally speaking.

Next, I'm going to work on the flying squirrels we got up there...