Breakfast visitors

Early morning is always breakfast time here at Union Church. Breakfast has a few regulars - Bliss and Spirit the dogs, Christopher and Eleia who though they've often been out all night hunting for mice and moles are usually hungry for boring kibble much to my surprise- and a few irregulars.

Most recently there have been a few of the irregulars moving into the regular category - which has intrigued me. It never dawned on me that mourning doves for example will eat sunflower seeds. However I have a pair that tried to nest in my driveway - don't know where they went to do that, perhaps just moved a few feet further up the road on the gravel shoulder - but they attend the feeder under the weeping birch every morning.

They don't get on the feeder very often, but it does happen.

Usually they wait for the other larger birds - the pair of grackles for example. Nobody seems to like grackles because they tend to maraud feeders, but I don't mind this pair that greet the arrival every morning of seed for their consumption with loud clicks and krrrs. They scatter seed to the ground which the ground feeders like some sparrows, certainly the mourning doves and occasionally a blue jay will gobble up and I'm sure there are many I don't even see. There is always seed left under the feeder, and cracked hulls. I rake up piles in the spring, and continue to remove the small hill every month.

I keep thinking I will put the feeders away for the summer - there is plenty of wild and natural food around - but then I so enjoy watching the goldfinches, the purple finches, the rose breasted gros beak threesome among the many different ones who greet me daily. They each call.  I'd like to think this is good morning but in reality is likely "hurry up where have you been - I'm hungry!"

And I guess that's what breakfast is all about - early morning sustenance to carry us through the day. I hope that you enjoy your breakfast as much as the natural world does. Even my fishes (if you could see the video I posted the other day) enjoy their breakfast.

So here's to breakfast - whatever time you enjoy it - midnight or 5 a.m. May everyone everywhere enjoy it every day - and because there are people all over the world who don't, this holiday weekend in North America - let's try to help those who don't, somehow, some way. If we each gave a couple of dollars a week to a food bank, or dropped a dollar into a street person's cup - we might begin to lessen some of the sadness and poverty everywhere.

Here's to breakfast and reaching out!
PS - the fishes in the new little gadget I've added to this page will follow your cursor. If you click in the square, you'll give the fish some food - they will race to it and devour it... someone was incredibly clever in designing this - and isn't it appropriate for this particular blog... if we could only click on something and provide some rice, wheat, whatever good food we could?