BFTP:It has been for that car but I think I fixed that this weekend.
Of course driving a rear wheel drive Italian sports car into the Pennsylvania mountains and the snow doesn't feel like the smartest thing ever.
Got yer back Jack
Everyone looks busy and happy
In times like this I appreciate my trucks 4x4BFTP:
What? @BY Bob, where is your sense of high adventure and exhilarating but manageable danger?
I mean, really, rear wheel vehicles were the norm for almost a century ......
just sayin'
Tax:
There are sparrows calling in the background!
I love this post. Thanks for sharing your well reasoned thoughts.You get a lot of joy out of watching and hearing the winter songbirds. They mean a lot to you and are a highlight helping you through a long winter. So you might consider resuming your feeder activity. Of course plan on scrupulously supervised time out of the run for your tribe. The downside I see is that hawk attacks on the songbirds will reinforce your tribe's caution and fear of the outside. If that's a good thing or not is for you to decide.
At this point, the plan so far has been to make your yard less attractive to hawks, particularly to that hawk that has been hanging around there, and with less hunting possibilities, the idea is maybe it will move on. I guess I think it's possible it will go elsewhere, but how will you be sure it's gone, or that another won't show up? Hawk patterns may be changing and you may have more of these as regular occupants of your neighborhood. So maybe it won't really make a difference in that respect whether you feed the wild birds or not.
Speaking for myself, I also am not feeding the birds this winter. But it is also one less thing for me to do every morning, and they will still nest near our house in Spring. We don't feed year-round b/c of bear anyway. I'm okay with not having a hawk swooping in to sit on one of the apple trees and the chickens subsequently freaking out. They already are on fairly high alert when in the big run with any little wild bird noise, and they can see fairly far through the plastic on one side. Plus, the regular appearance of Cooper's hawks hunting the chickadees is nice to do without (and also the associated guilt of having attracted the chickadees here in the first place). Part of me irrationally thinks that not having a feeder will keep the chickens a secret to passing hawks.
But in the end I think about both our situations and ask, okay, how will we know this strategy is effective? At what point will we be comfortable enough to risk unsupervised time out of the run? The answer for me right now is that level of comfort is not likely to come about. Hawks are always passing through on the regular, or the winds have brought some off their usual migration paths and to an area they hadn't been before, or there are pressures on juveniles to leave their home territory and go exploring. So I don't see the threat ever really going away enough for me no matter what happens with the feeder.
Sorry for the long post. I've been thinking about this for awhile, going back and forth on it, and your comment prompted me to write it out.
It is very hard to know what to do and I have been thinking about it a lot too.You get a lot of joy out of watching and hearing the winter songbirds. They mean a lot to you and are a highlight helping you through a long winter. So you might consider resuming your feeder activity. Of course plan on scrupulously supervised time out of the run for your tribe. The downside I see is that hawk attacks on the songbirds will reinforce your tribe's caution and fear of the outside. If that's a good thing or not is for you to decide.
At this point, the plan so far has been to make your yard less attractive to hawks, particularly to that hawk that has been hanging around there, and with less hunting possibilities, the idea is maybe it will move on. I guess I think it's possible it will go elsewhere, but how will you be sure it's gone, or that another won't show up? Hawk patterns may be changing and you may have more of these as regular occupants of your neighborhood. So maybe it won't really make a difference in that respect whether you feed the wild birds or not.
Speaking for myself, I also am not feeding the birds this winter. But it is also one less thing for me to do every morning, and they will still nest near our house in Spring. We don't feed year-round b/c of bear anyway. I'm okay with not having a hawk swooping in to sit on one of the apple trees and the chickens subsequently freaking out. They already are on fairly high alert when in the big run with any little wild bird noise, and they can see fairly far through the plastic on one side. Plus, the regular appearance of Cooper's hawks hunting the chickadees is nice to do without (and also the associated guilt of having attracted the chickadees here in the first place). Part of me irrationally thinks that not having a feeder will keep the chickens a secret to passing hawks.
But in the end I think about both our situations and ask, okay, how will we know this strategy is effective? At what point will we be comfortable enough to risk unsupervised time out of the run? The answer for me right now is that level of comfort is not likely to come about. Hawks are always passing through on the regular, or the winds have brought some off their usual migration paths and to an area they hadn't been before, or there are pressures on juveniles to leave their home territory and go exploring. So I don't see the threat ever really going away enough for me no matter what happens with the feeder.
Sorry for the long post. I've been thinking about this for awhile, going back and forth on it, and your comment prompted me to write it out.
