One of the few negatives about raising chickens and ducks is that we are strongly discouraged from feeding wild birds. The official concern is wild birds passing disease to our birds. This is most likely to happen around feeders, where the birds’ droppings could accumulate. If you reverse the approach, the advantage of having chickens when you are feeding songbirds is that the chickens clean up the mess under the feeders. Anyway, we don’t have bird feeders around anymore. We have bird houses, but not bird feeders.
When I went out yesterday I could hear little peeps in the trees and wondered how the food supply is holding up with all this snow. When I went down to check the bees, I walked down to check the perennial flowers, hoping to find them nicely tucked under the snow. The flower plants are. I looked at the sunflowers and they had been cleaned out of seed, as in the photo above. I checked some other seedheads around, like the rudbeckia below, and found they still have seed in them. Birds have survived snowy winters for many centuries, so I won’t worry. I do feel concern for them, but worrying won’t help. We do maintain lots of shelter for them.
