PORTLAND – December’s Winter storms keep outdoors people and their families indoor more than we may personally like; but there are still things going on outside to enjoy through home or business windows while we wait for December 22 and the Winter Solstice – which means the warmth of the sun is returning back to the Northern Hemisphere and bringing summer BACK 6 months away.
It is odd to think that Africa, South America and Australia celebrate Christmas during their “summer season”!
Winter backyard bird feeding is a wonderful way to still enjoy the outdoors and the myriad of small, colorful, animated native song birds outside while we humans are drinking hot cocoa & marshmallows inside a warm structure and timidly watch winter storms passing by.
The cover photo shows my wife’s creative winter project with an old pine cone spread with a creamy peanut butter mixed with bird seeds and this is a real big hit with all winter birds!
The photo shows an Oregon Junco eating the peanut butter coated birdseeds. Note: Plain peanut butter alone can get stuck in bird’s mouth or throat and choke them. This photo has a softened texture; as it was taken through an open screen door to not frighten the birds outside. It is an interesting photographer’s trick!
However, backyard bird feeding is often thought of only as a winter OUTDOOR RECREATION OPTION; but these small energized birds can use plenty of food/energy all year round to breed, raise young, molt and migrate daily to find enough food to not run out of gas!
· ATTRACTING BIRDS TO YOUR BACKYARD by Sally Roth (Rodale Press, Inc. Emmaus, PA, 1998)
·
· Author Sally Roth above does have an interesting quote on page 34:
EATING LIKE A BIRD – the metabolism of a bird is something I can only envy – if I could burn calories as fast as they do, I’d be a fashion model in no time.
Smaller birds have an especially high metabolic rate. Their bodies zip along at an internal temperature around 20 percent higher than ours, and they’re often constantly in motion.
When someone claims she eats like a bird, she usually means she’s a light eater. But in fact birds have to eat huge amounts to maintain {energy} their activity level.
HERE IS A COMPARISION by Author Sally Roth:
MULTIPLY YOUR WEIGHT BY 4. THE RESULT IS THE NUMBER OF HAMBURGERS YOU’D HAVE TO EAT PER DAY IN ORDER TO TRULY IMITATE THE EATING HABITS OF SOME SPECIES OF BIRDS.
Observations of caged birds show that food-intakes vary greatly from bird species – even inside a warm home.
Some small to medium size songbirds consume the equivalent of 80 to 100 percent of their body weight ever day.”
Human bodies must maintain body temperatures around 98 to 99 degrees (F) to stay healthy; however, wild birds outside have must maintain body temperatures in the 102-08 range in a smaller body outside with no coat. Abundant food or energy is how they must & can survive.
Fortunately, with over 70 percent of the world human population now residing in urban areas; we human can empathetically help our wild small neighbors by planting natural bird food plants or buy bird seed for feeders.
Wild Bird Inc. website explains what is involved with bird feeders and where Portland stores are located near you:
Frankly, It is no wonder bird watching year-round has become a major year-round American pastime at home and on outside adventures; it becoming almost as popular as summer gardening.
Still, our winter is a great time to mull over last summer’s photographs and memories and even plan next summer special trips with your family; but one can even use the “quiet time” to re-asses your personal relationship to our planet Earth that supports us daily indirectly.
Please take a moment to mull over this timely and interesting FOOD FOR THOUGHT:
THE UNSETTLING OF AMERICA by Wendell Berry (Avon Publisher NY, 1997)
OREGON OUTDOORS ADVENTURERS WILL ENJOY THIS older yet timely Insight!
ECOLOGIST WENDELL BERRY EXPLAINS: PAGE 22-23:
“The Concept of country, homeland…becomes simplified as ‘THE ENVIRONMENT’ – or that is what surrounds us.
Once we see our place, our world, as surrounding us, we have already made a profound division between it and ourselves.
We have given up THE UNDERSTANDING… that we and our country create one another, depend on one another, are literally part of one another; that our land passes in and out of our bodies just as our bodies pass in and out of our land; that as we and our land are part of one another, so all who are living as neighbors here, human and plant and animal, are part of one another, and so cannot possibly flourish alone...
Interestingly, Basic science & economics specializes in focusing on differences between species and us; and our modern capital mongers literally work this “profound division” between human families & nature to make ever greater profits at the Earth’s, Nature and our collective expense as taxpayers – WE THE People.
This ecologic versus economics fact is the taproot for the “Occupy Wall Street” protests going on right now.
In our hearts & mind, we humans naturally feel thankful for the myriad of selfless plants releasing the our Oxygen we breathe to survive moment by moment as we read this passage and we naturally & gratefully share this world with neighbors beyond the SELF - created by Someone other than you and me.
HOWEVER, “Because by definition they {Wall Street} lack any such sense {THE UNDERSTANDING} of mutuality or wholeness, our specializations subsist on conflict with one another. The Rule is never to cooperate; but rather to follow one’s own interest as far as possible. Checks and balances are all applied externally, by opposition, never by self-restraint.
Labor, management, the military, the government, etc, never forbear until excesses arouse enough opposition to force them to do so. The Good of the Whole of Creation, the world and all its creatures together, IS NEVER a capitalist consideration because it is NEVER thought of; our culture now simply lacks the means for thinking of it!
It is for this reason that none of our basic problems is ever solved. Indeed, it is for this reason that our basic problems are getting worse.
The specialists are profiting too well from the symptoms, evidently, to be concerned about cures – just as the Myth of “imminent cure!” (by some breakthrough of science or technology) is so lucrative and all-justifying; as to foreclose any possibility or any interest in PREVENTION.
The problems thus become the stock & trade of specialists. The so-called professions today survive by endlessly “processing” and talking about problems that they have neither the will nor the competence to solve. The doctor who is interested in disease; but not in health is clearly in the same category with the conservationist who invests in the destruction of what he otherwise intends to preserve. They both have the comfort of “job security”; but its denial is at the cost of ultimate futility and a COST all Earthlings in-directly must bear for generations.”
Forgive the long quote to set up an explanation why us AVERAGE humans solve more problems today than “Self-interest Institutions!
“This has become, to some extent at least, an argument against institutional solutions. Such solutions necessarily Fail to solve the problem to which they are addressing – because , by definition, they cannot consider the real causes. The only real, practical, hope-giving way to remedy the fragmentation that is the DISEASE of the modern spirit is a small and humble way – a way that a government or agency organization or institution WILL NEVER THINK OF, though a person may think of it: ONE Must begin in one’s own life the private solutions that can only in turn become public solutions.
Long Story-short, Thank you for considering our wonder-full wild birds this Portland Oregon winter.
WHY?
Check out a recent 1995 USDA U.S. Forest Service comprehensive research available in a brochure at any U .S. Forest Service Office.
[1]SAVE OUR BIRDS-SAVE OUR FORESTS, USDA U.S. FOREST SERVICE brochure December 1995
Look for SAVE OUR BIRDS-SAVE OUR FORESTS BROCHURE with a brilliant red-headed, pretty scarlet red-headed Tanager {about the size of a bluebird} on the cover.
SAVE OUR BIRDS-SAVE OUR FORESTS[1] writes “Every summer, forest-dwelling birds protect our National Forests in the Pacific Northwest by devouring millions of potentially damaging insects.”
“One of the earliest signs of spring has always been the countless flocks of migrating birds that pass through or come to stay for the summer in our gardens, fields, and forests. The National Forests alone in the Pacific Northwest are home to about 170 species of summer birds. Of these, nearly 60 percent are “Neotropical Migratory Birds” that fly south during winters.
Neotropical Migratory Birds – ones like the Rufus Hummingbird, the Western Scarlet Tanager, or any of the several warblers of our Northwest forests –spend only a third of their lives in the United States or Canada. The rest of the time, they live in tropical regions of Mexico, Central and South America, the Caribbean islands or areas en route between their summer and winter homes.
Some of the nearly 200 species of Neotropical Migratory Birds travel thousands of miles twice a year.”
USFS STATEMENT“In other words, birds ate five of every six caterpillars! The birds were making a difference!”
*Not all birds eat insects; but the majority does. And some species eat as many as 300 insects a day during summer months. A breeding pair of evening grosbeaks can devour 25,000 to 50,000 caterpillars just in the period it takes them to raise a family!
* Forest Service biologists in the Pacific Northwest have recently learned that 35 species of birds, including 24 Neotropical migrants, feed on the Western Spruce budworm and the Douglas-fir Tussock Moth, which are the two most destructive defoliating insects there.”
One remarkable thing about humans is we often care about our neighborhood’s wildlife; and they (birds or fish) probably would not care if we were shivering in their shoes or tracks. That is one thing that makes human remarkably different from other animals; we seem to care. Maybe we were meant to be “Caretakers” naturally?
Famous Birder ROGER Tory Peterson quote:
SAVE THE BIRDS by Roger Tory Peterson has a personal quote on why we all should perpetuate wild birds by Roger Tory Peterson himself:
“Birds have been the focus of my life ever since I was a boy of eleven. I can remember the day in early April, even the hour, when I became hooked. On a Saturday morning during one of my youthful explorations, I spotted a bundle of red-headed brown feathers clinging to a tree. It was a Flicker {woodpecker}, tired from migration.
The bird was sleeping with its bill tucked under the loose feathers of its back; but I thought it was dead!
I poked it with my finger; instantly this inert thing jerked its head around, looked at me wildly, then took off in a flash of gold. It was a resurrection. What had seemed dead was very much ALIVE. Ever since then, birds have seemed to me the most vivid expression of life, I, for one, would find the world quite desolate if there were no birds.
If we are to save the birds, we have to make as many people as possible aware of the real threat to their survival. I can think of no better way of doing that than through the publication of SAVE THE BIRDS. I have contributed my own time and effort to this book because I feel it is one of the most valuable conservation projects of our time…We must save the birds, and in saving them, we will save the World. “
· SAVE THE BIRDS by Roger Tory Peterson et al (A PRO NATUR Book, Boston MA, 1989, page 9)
·
Moreover watching birds in side doors or outside is simply fun year-round; but especially during the harsh winters!
It also helps our kids get an obvious interest in science, math and reading for later on! Trick them into love learning as youngsters and they’ll excel as college students.
JERRY BAKER (www.JERRYBAKER.COM) has written BIRD GARDENING SECRETS 101 –TERRIFIC TIPS FOR BIRDING ON A BUDGET.
Jerry writes:
“I tell you, there’s nothing quite like a yard that’s busting with bird activity. Between listening to all the beautiful songs, helping hungry birds enjoy a meal, and even watching downy fledglings learn to fly – providing a bird-friendly habitat in your own backyard is about as close to Mom Nature as you can get.
No matter how small your yard is, it can be a feathered-friend haven – and you don’t have to break the bank to do it! All you need is a little food, one mulberry or viburnum shrub, a reliable water source, shelter from the weather, and a safe place to raise a family.”
Oregon outdoor adventurers and their families travel thousands of miles to watch wildlife. Odd one can do it at home too.
Other Quotes to consider:
Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.
Henry Ford
Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family. Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.
Jane Howard, "Families"
Although a man may wear fine clothing, if he lives peacefully; and is good, self-possessed, has faith and is pure; and if he does not hurt any living being, he is a holy man.
Denis Diderot
Smoking calms me down. It's enjoyable. I don't want politicians deciding what is exciting in my life.
David Hockney
But the moment you use an ordinary camera, you are not seeing the picture, remember, meaning, you had to remember what you've taken. Now you could see it of course, with a digital thing, but remember in 1982 you couldn't.
David Hockney
“What orbit of the planets has put you and me in this place, at this moment? Where time takes a breath, and we dance on the edge of our dreams?” ~Anonymous
“What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matter compared to what lies within us.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
I cook with wine, sometimes I even add it to the food.
W. C. Fields
PLEASE - Please click on the subscribe or “Follow” button over this article to receive free email notifications of future articles by this author.
Author’s new 2011 “In-depth” books: BBQ, BAMBOO & SPICE BEDS, DEER PROOFING LANDSCAPES, OLD GLORY GARDEN–PATRIOT’S EDITION, PACIFIC COAST PIRATES & SPANISH GALLEONS are now available on AMAZON:
LINK - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1463755910
MY AMAZON NEW BOOKS: http://www.amazon.com/Dave-Sandersfeld/e/B006H3CPOS/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1322932589&sr=8-1
& E-BOOKs READY @ Kindle store!
© Copyright 2011. Dave Sandersfeld.
Permission is granted to include extracts of this article on websites and email lists with a link to the original. This article is copyrighted © and should not be added in its entirety on other websites or email lists without author's permission. For Article Comment sharing –
Please contact Author at: FatherNature2@gmail.com.or www.fncbooks.com.
The secret to this fun website is clicking on photos for transport to another website!
[1] SAVE OUR BIRDS-SAVE OUR FORESTS ,USDA U.S. FOREST SERVICE brochure December 1995
Comments