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["Kathy Kreutzer" <k-kreutzer@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hope everyone is having a good holiday!
Kathy Kreutzer, Chesterfield, VA
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GARDENING
Bird stories are feathers in their caps
By Carol Stocker, Globe Staff, 12/25/2003
Seventy million people feed birds, and occasionally they see something rare
or exciting. Last week, some 5-foot-tall sandhill cranes, usually found in
the Midwest, turned up at a feeder on Cape Cod. For several years now,
individual rufous hummingbirds from the western United States have appeared
in the Connecticut River Valley.

"People have taken them into their greenhouses and over-wintered them," said
Massachusetts Audubon Society naturalist Chris Leahy. "One has returned to
the same private greenhouse for several winters in a row. They may be
pioneers extending their range."

People often have special relationships with wild birds that enrich their
lives. While most birds don't require human hand-outs, said Leahy, "we know,
for example, a certain number of Baltimore orioles don't go south for
whatever reason, and could not survive the winter without feeders."

Linda Cocca, who runs the society's wildlife information line, found one of
these last winter, huddled in a domed suction-cup feeder on her second-floor
window in Watertown.

"He would use the feeder for shelter and would sit in it," she said. "I had
sunflower hearts. He'd pick them up and drop them until he found one that
was small, so I put them in my blender, to make them really small, and he
guzzled them and made it through the winter. The last time I saw him was in
May. Before that, I'd never seen an oriole in my yard, just at Mount Auburn
Cemetery."

Hugh Wiberg, who writes a birding column for the Wilmington Town Crier, is
well known for training wild birds to eat hulled sunflower seeds out of his
hand. Author of the best-selling "Hand Feeding Backyard Birds" (Storey
Books), he has trained chickadees (the easiest), tufted titmice,
white-breasted and red-breasted nuthatches, and downy woodpeckers.

Wiberg's readers annually report seeing 28-30 different birds in their
backyards, including occasional turkeys, which were exterminated in
Massachusetts before the Civil War but were reintroduced in the 1970s and
now number almost 20,000 statewide.

"A couple of elderly women in Rockport called the police, because there were
a pair of turkeys on their porch and they were afraid to go out," said
Leahy. "There's nothing to fear. Just take a broom to them. But they can be
intimidating because they're so large. A turkey cock stands 3 1/2 feet
tall."

Massachusetts isn't the only state where gobblers have made a comeback.
Barbara Ellis, author of "Taylor's Weekend Gardening Guides: Attracting
Birds and Butterflies," thought it was neat when a few turkeys first
appeared on her rural property in eastern Pennsylvania, but she took down
most of her feeders a couple of years ago when the hungry winter flock
swelled to 65. "That's just too many turkeys!"

Two new bird species from the mid-Atlantic states are the melodious Carolina
wren and the handsome red-bellied woodpecker, which actually has a red crown
and nape, not a red stomach. Both are attracted to suet, which you can buy
from your local butcher, grocery meat department, or in preformed cakes
where birdseed is sold. The best all-around seed for most birds is black oil
sunflower seed, but each species has its particular tastes and habits.

For instance, Lincoln dentist Winty Harrington feeds bluebirds throughout
the year with live mealworms ($36 plus shipping buys him 10,000 mealworms, a
month's supply, from Grub Co., Box 15001, Hamilton, Ohio 45015;
800-222-3563). "I transfer them to a plastic washtub, then we sprinkle half
a container of cornmeal in there and cut up some apples every day so they
can consume moisture. I use a sieve each morning to separate some out and I
call out, `Hey bluebirds! Come and get it!' They'll come right down. I put
the mealworms inside a birdhouse where the bluebirds nest in the springtime
so it's a place they are accustomed to, and where they have no competition
from other birds. . . because all birds love mealworms!" Yum.

Harrington has built his home and office over a dammed-up waterway in the
middle of his family's old farm. The walls are largely glass so his patients
can watch the birds while in the dentist's chair. He also feeds ducks and
geese.

"They come up and put their bills against the window," he said. "One day, my
hygienist grabbed a Canada goose -- which you shouldn't do because they can
put your eye out -- but she carried this one right into the office and it
sat in her arms until she showed everybody. Then she took it back outside
and it shook itself and started eating cracked corn again. We've also had
snow geese, which are rare, and hooded mergansers."

What Harrington is famous for locally, however, is feeding vultures, another
relatively new bird here.

"I collect road kill a couple of times a month, whenever I have my trailer,"
he said. "I don't want to throw a dead racoon into the car! I'll pick it up
and put it in front of our office, and I'll let the vultures come. We've had
as many as four at a time." It certainly distracts the patients during
dental procedures.

While Harrington is an enthusiast, Doris and Ted Bardsley of Lincoln say
they accidentally stumbled into a 20-year backyard relationship with a pair
of red-shouldered hawks, and didn't even realize at first that it was
unusual.

"It started because my husband's mother had cleaned out her freezer and had
some meat she was throwing away, and he said he would put it out for the
crows," recalled Doris. "So he put it in the yard and saw the crows were
circling but that there was a hawk standing in the middle of it. It was a
lone female. So he started cooking up ground turkey and chicken for her, but
the neighbor's dog would eat some of it, and the neighbor didn't want that,
so he built an 8-foot-tall feeding platform. When she would hear the garage
door open each morning, you could see her perking up. He'd whistle and call
her `Big Bird' and she'd come."

Several years later, the female hawk was joined by a male who also came to
the feeding platform. They built a nest in a big oak nearby and raised a
brood each year.

"A couple of the young ones came to the feeder, but not for long," said
Doris. Since red-shouldered hawks prefer mice to birds, the local avian
population cohabited peacefully with the hawk family.

"Someone told us these hawks don't live more than 12 years, but these were
well fed, and you could tell they were the same ones because of the way they
interacted with my husband," said Doris.

Last spring, the Bardsleys saw the female only once, and then she
disappeared for good. The male built a nest by himself and continued to come
to the feeder all season, then he, too, disappeared three months ago. Doris
was philosophical about the end of the long relationship. Ted himself had
suffered a heart attack in April and was finding the hawk feeding tiring to
keep up.

"We miss them," she said. "But that's the way life is."

© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.


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