Our beautiful weeping cherry tree in front of our house died suddenly last month. My date and I cut it down because I wanted to save it and use it inside an 8 foot diameter outdoor aviary for the squirrels. I had grand plans to make them the habitat of their dreams until reality set in.
For one, the aviary I wanted to get for them was close to $4,000. That is our family medical deductible which has already been met with my recent surgery. (Now we have to pay 20% of the remaining endless bills...). Second, it would have been so large it would obscure the view from our very open back of the house. And third, it could only go outside so that meant I could only watch them if I wanted to be outside. In the summer I do not like to be bitten by bugs so I prefer the protection of our screen porch.
So my plans were scaled down. The squirrels have a five foot indoor aviary that we will put on the screen porch. It arrived yesterday and when my date e-mailed me most solicitously to see how I was doing I told him I unloaded it from the truck myself and put it together. It weighs 450 pounds. He had to ask me if I was kidding.
The tree was carefully placed into a very heavy Christmas tree holder by my sisters and me prior to the flesh cutting. It is absolutely gorgeous. After I came home from the hospital we went to the local Wild Birds Unlimited store and got all kinds of great things to hang in the tree. (What was I thinking???? I should have been lying on the couch!)
We bought a small chickadee feeder, a peanut feeder and a suet/bark butter feeder for the woodpeckers, a Nyger thistle seed feeder for the finches and I had a small bird house (actually poor Amelia's previous house, filled pitifully with straw and dried potato peels when I cleaned it out) and two hummingbird feeders. I added a fake nest purchased from a craft store to one of the top branches and filled it with regular bird seed for the bigger birds. We set up the tree and I moved several of the planters of lantana and the passion flower vine nearby. This morning my date moved the bird bath under it as well.
It has been innundated with greedy hummingbirds, tufted titmice, chickadees, finches, baby cardinals and sparrows but surprisingly, no squirrels. (Maybe it is the five predators keeping watch from the porch and the windows...) At night I bring in the feeders to prevent masked bandits from eating the food and leaving nasty gifts like the one they left my older sister near her computer mouse pad.
The hummingbirds show up at dawn and dive bomb my head as I hang their sugar water feeders up. They like for it to stay up until well after dark and if I try to take it down early they dive bomb my head then, too. They like to sit on the branches of the tree which makes for great watching with binoculars. They cannot resist that homemade nectar.
Neither can my date, apparently.
This morning yet another glass of Miralax-tainted pink lemonade was sitting on the counter. I watched as he approached it and reached for it... and then jerked his hand back as if he had been burned. He exclaimed, "Close call!" and allowed as he had almost partaken of that irresistible nectar.
At least he did not dive bomb my head although I think he would have been bombing something else if he had actually done what he had intended to do. I guess raccoons aren't the only ones you have to watch out for getting into what is not theirs!
View from the "Hospice Recliner" July 30, 2010
