my problem with mourning doves is the ones here use my car as their personal toilet. I came out one morning for the newspaper, saw one standing on the roof of my car, and while I watched, he pooped.
I’m not a fan, unfortunately.

Christmas trees year round are festive! That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Gah! Christmas tree *lights*

Leaving your Christmas lights up all year is tacky. However, I’m a fan of New Years lights, Epiphany lights, Valentines lights, my-sister’s-birthday lights, etc. Besides, if you put a dwarf mango in your back yard, who will see it? Nearly all Northern California yards are fenced.

Meanwhile,I wonder what that mourning dove is writing in HER blog. “I’ve never really studied a human before. This one had a pleasantly curved mouth and shiny round eyes. Really quite pretty for a non-dove.”

How about just petite white lights in the tree? It will be like ambiance than Christmas.

Love the bird info. Beautiful red cardinal came today…no seed in the feeder because of the crows. A finch came and tasted the thistle seed.

I am suddenly smitten by the mango this year. Not so much the fresh ones, but I am devouring the mango smoothies at J-I-T-B every chance I get. Can a mango splitter be far behind?

I volunteer in wildlife rehab and “my” birds are mourning doves (though this summer, I’ve also been doing the juvenile house finches). Doves are super easy to care for – their needs are very simple – and they can survive some pretty traumatic injuries.

If you look carefully, you can even tell males from females. Look for the iridescent patch of pink on the neck and watch that color glow as boy tries to impress girl 🙂

Christmas lights! Now, why didn’t I think of that? And, ROFL, with Richard’s concern. Sounds like what my DH would say. Ya gotta love ’em.

I like the white lights suggestion or the whatever occasion you want to call it suggestion. A lighted tree in the yard, year-round, sounds lovely. We’d never see it through the snow here!

Love your descriptions of the birds, but I cannot imagine you as a “screaming “GET OFF THAT!” wild woman running at it flailing her arms” but I would pay to see the video, lol!

I’m a little behind due to the holiday, but hope you had a great holiday weekend!

I will never forget after my son had tube surgery when he was four and he could finally hear, we walked out the door and he asked, “What’s that sound?” It was a bird chirping. It brought me to tears.

I love listening to the birds in our woods. It’s one of the things that makes day after day of rain so hard… the silence…

I would miss the sounds of the birds. There are some good CDs and computer programs that have bird sounds on them, and Cornell’s All About Birds website has bird sounds for each species, if you’re wanting to learn more about the sounds. I can only identify maybe half of what I hear around our house, but the bird song in the morning is, I think, the very definition of “joyful noise.” (Not that they’re any quieter in the evening, mind you!! Especially the veery, HE belts it out all dusk. And occasionally we hear a whippoorwill at night, and then the owls! Oh, yes, I’d miss the birds.)

Momo Fali’s comment reminds me of the story of when my sister got glasses. She came out of the doctor’s with her new glasses and realized that the trees had individual leaves.

My Heavens! From your description, one might think you and Richard live in some country area, not the heavily populated San Francisco peninsula.

I have a window type air conditioner here in my den, and the part that sticks outside slopes down a bit. Doves have tried to build nests on it, and then are apparently surprised when the eggs roll off and break on the ground. They haven’t done that lately.

Humor:
The air conditioner I mentioned is sometimes referred to as a mugwump. Which reminds me of a child’s definition of a mugwump. That’s a bird that sits on a branch with its mug on one side, and its wump on the other.

Our anti-squirrel device is to stand by the screen door ready to quickly open it….then to whisper “squirrel”. Our dog comes flying around the corner, out she goes, and gives the poor squirrel the fright of it’s life! We’ve only had one squirrel that was smart enough to just scramble a little higher into the tree the feeder is in. The others have all jumped, hit the ground 5-7 feet away and ran at breakneck speed for the trees on the perimeter of our property.

The dog never catches them. If she could actually get them I wouldn’t let her out. I’m too much of a softy.

Totally unrelated, but when I worked at Apple, I worked closely with the Sonic Innovations folks and they were CHARMING. If I recall, they were putting together a product that would assist people with hearing aids to be able to use an iPod. 🙂

HAH I always giggle when I see people leaving their X-Mas lights up.

You could change the lights by season, then it would be an indication of pride, not sloth :-}

Ah, the great squirrel battle. I like tree rats, so I don’t worry about how much seed they eat. My Mom, on the other hand, wants the seed to go to the birds, so whenever she sees a raider, she rushes out onto the back deck hollering and waving her arms. Until the time she forgot she’d just gotten out of the tub and hadn’t dressed yet…

That poor squirrel took one look at the naked, screaming octogenarian charging him and leaped off the two stories up deck. He landed running and was never seen again.

Okay, what hearing aids did you get? Cause when I get my next pair…..

I suffer from lack of light during the very long cold season here. We leave the lights on our windows (inside) until around April some years, just to keep me from suffering depression. The more colors, the better!

I don’t care if people think I’m wrong doing it, for whatever reason. I know someone who MUST put up the Christmas tree on the day after Thanksgiving, and MUST take it down on New Year’s Day. Schedules for celebration don’t make sense to me.

Today, however, the colors here are the climbing roses, a hydrangea bush (white) and daylilies. There is nothing like Summer in Michigan!