When we were moving, there were certain things that we had to make decisions about. One of them being the bird feeders. It's illegal to move seeds or even remnants of seeds. In order for the movers to move the feeders we would have needed to thoroughly wash them and disinfect them. I decided to donate to friends that also liked birds instead.
Seeing as I had chosen not to bring our feeders I was excited to go out and purchase one here. I had brought my sheppard's hooks from Canada to hang them on, so I got a tube feeder set up in the back yard, just outside our window and I waited. And waited. And waited. It was fall/winter so the varieties of birds were limited but not one of them wanted my seeds.
One bird that we saw everywhere was a medium sized black and white bird, A called it a penguin bird. We would see it perched on fence posts, or our arbour in the backyard. It especially loved the supports for the enclosure around the trampoline. It's actual name is the common fiscal, a member of the shrike family.
Even though they are all over the place it's been hard to get a good photo of one. I never seem to be able to get my camera out before it flies away.
I couldn't figure out why they didn't want my feed. It was winter after all. I supposed maybe it was because winter here isn't like winter in Canada where food is scarce. Here nothing freezes or gets buried by snow, there are still berries on the trees and grass seeds. Still, they were the only birds around and they had to eat. I tried changing the type of seeds, nothing. I put the seeds in a flat dish and that attracted the doves and pigeons that couldn't sit on the tube feeder, but I saw no other birds.
Oh well, so much for focusing on the birds, maybe in the spring I reasoned. I decided to inspect the different plant life in and around garden instead. Our house had been empty for 2 1/2 years and there had been a severe drought before we moved in so the gardens were in pretty sad shape.
Take the acacia tree in our front yard. The main stem was damaged and you can see where the healthy, beautiful green truck changes to dead grey trunk.
Our neighbours have a healthy acacia tree, which looks like this.
The cool part of the acacia tree is what it looks like up close.
Each spike is around 10cm long. I have been told that giraffe's are the only mammal that can eat the leaves without hurting themselves because their tongues are so long, but I don't know that for sure.
Anyway, one morning I was out gardening and watering around the half dead acacia tree and I notice something strange. There was a big black beetle impaled on one of the spikes. After picking the kids up at school I told them about this neat thing I had found on the tree and took them to see. The beetle was gone. "Yah, right, there was a bug there." They told me.
So, I kept an eye on the tree just to see what happened. Every few days a bug of some description would appear. Once there was even a snail. It was always the same spike too, but I never saw anything else near the tree. Eventually, the kids saw it too.
This went on for weeks. I assumed it must be a bird of some kind, but I had no idea which one.
I mentioned it to the gardener that I had helping me clean up the gardens and he said "Oh, that's a butcher bird doing that." I said, "Pardon me?" He explained that the common name of the common fiscal was the butcher bird. It's called that because it catches bugs or small rodents and then uses acacia trees to age the bug. In a few days when it has aged sufficiently it comes back to eat it.
Well, now it made sense. My bird feeder wasn't attracting any birds not only because they had all migrated north for the winter, but because the birds that were left were carnivores.
Now that spring is truly in full swing the birds have migrated back. I've seen the bird feeder used by weavers, though they are often chased away by the fiscal's. The bird calls start at 0400 every morning. It has been interesting to hear all the different calls. Unfortunately, I have been unable to determine which call goes with which bird. The trees behind our property are a little bit too far away to get good pictures with my current lens, so though I said in an earlier post that a telephoto lens wasn't necessary, it would be nice to have for the birds.
Our most exciting observations of bird life have been very up close and personal, but that's for another post, so stay tuned.
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