Our official bird walks started off slow. Out of 4 morning walks we only had two people. That’s okay, we usually go ahead and do the walk anyway. The main reason we’re in this area is to bird. We bird every day.
We work 25 hours (total) for our site here. Every morning we check and fill the bird feeders at two viewing sites and a couple of other sites (headquarters, rec hall) that have bird feeders. During the night racoons empty all the feeders, including the hummingbird feeders so we only put out enough food in the mornings to carry through that day.
A popular food for the birds is a peanut butter/lard/cornmeal mixture that we make. We have a personal peanut butter “log” that Mark made about 25 years ago. It’s a tree branch that he drilled holes into. We stuff the peanut butter mixture into the holes. It’s more natural for the birds to land on the log and dig and probe out the mixture.
When we got here, we could only find one peanut butter log in the bird blinds so Mark made a few new ones.
Being at the beach, this area has very sandy soil. It’s great for growing grass burs. The ground inside the bird feeding stations is covered with grass burs. Since we’re in that area every day, we decided to start digging them up.
This site didn’t take too long (4-5 hours) for us to get most of the burs up. We filled our container up 3 times! I bought a fleece blanket at the thrift store to drag over the ground and pick up as many grass burs as we could.
I’m sure we missed some plants but we’ll keep at it.
It’s oyster season and we have started seeing the oyster boats on our walk to the new fishing pier.
The fishing pier is usually very popular but it was pretty windy today and we had the whole pier to ourselves.
It’s not all birds, there
are other critters to look for in the park.
Wow, that time is going fast! Always nice to get "paid" for something you'd want to do anyway.
ReplyDeleteWe are enjoying it here and are glad to be back.
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