Our Little Baby Blog

Birdhouse

Last week was all about birds and birdhouses. We actually had a theme for the week. Don't be too impressed. It won't likely happen again soon. You see, our next door neighbor has the most amazing birds. They've got gorgeous flowers and a very nicely cultivated lawn and garden, including lots of bird feeders. These feeders attract the most amazing birds, seriously, I'm sort of fascinated with them. We see cardinals, several kinds of woodpeckers, and these blue birds that I would love to know more about.

It's great to have such a nature buffet out our back door. I decided I'd take advantage of it, so we pulled out a dirty old bird feeder we found in our shed (score!) and cleaned it up. I looked up on the interweb what types of feed would attract wild birds in the midwest. Sunflower seeds appear to be all the rage with wild birds in our area. So I explained to Anna that birds really like food and if we wanted them to come to our bird house, we'd have to find something they want to eat.

We drove out to a local lawn and garden place and bought several varieties of sunflower seeds - good thing I looked it up because I would have been a bit lost there. Side note - Anna enjoyed running around and yanking on the beautiful glass bird feeders, scaring me half to death that we'd end up having to buy a thousand broken feeders from the store.

When we got home, I had Anna dump all the seeds in the bird feeder (of course she loved this, and it was a royal mess, which means it was a major success!) We ended up setting the feeder out on the back porch because I realized quickly that we don't really have any trees in our yard. We have lots of branches from our neighbors' trees that have made their way into our yard... but they're pretty high up and can't be seen from the back door. I really wanted Anna to be able to see the bird feeder.

Mistake. Big mistake. The squirrels were like wild animals, diving into the bird feeder, picking out the sunflower seeds, it might as well have been swarming season here. Anna was very troubled by this because I'd been saying over and over again that birds would be visiting the feeder. "But I want the BIRDS to come," she kept saying. When Mike got home that night, Anna told him that our bird feeder turned into a squirrel feeder. I actually thought it was kind of funny and definitely entertaining to watch squirrels - they are ridiculously aggressive. But Anna was majorly bummed.

I do think she learned a few things from last week though... she remembers that a bird's mouth is a beak. She knows that birds like sunflower seeds (and squirrels do too) and that not all birds fly. Ostriches are the biggest birds, but they do not fly. She will tell you that pretty quickly if you begin to ask her about birds.

Junior Trivial Pursuit, watch out!