that exclamation point shouldn’t be necessary; since they snarfed down the cold vegetable pot pie lickety split, wouldn’t you think that of course starlings would eat blueberries?
but here’s the thing – wouldn’t you assume that ALL birds like blueberries, not just starlings? can’t you picture a blueberry bush on a sunny summer morning, and the birds swooping in and nibbling on the delicious berries?
yeah, that’s what i thought when i scattered an entire carton of blueberries going bad all around the bird food on the deck. the little green container right next to the window, the one with the large potato sitting next to it, is already filled with bird food plus cut-up pieces of sweet potato (birds don’t like ANY KINDS of raw potatoes), and now the container also has blueberries.
i sat back and waited for the birds to eat the blueberries…but they didn’t. maybe the blueberries are too big for the smaller birds? maybe i should have cut them in half? the birds were eating like crazy, but they wouldn’t touch the blueberries.
this was concerning to me because the green thing is now full of bird seed and sweet potatoes and blueberries, and if it ever warms up again and then rains, it’ll be a big messy bowl of blueberry sweet potato soup.
but then the starlings arrived, and i watched as one scooped up a blueberry and gulp gulp gulped it right down. more and more starlings showed up, and they all seemed very happy to eat the blueberries.
the only problem is that starlings don’t have the best table manners; they were flinging the bird seed around a lot, and sometimes the blueberries rolled down to the floor of the deck. this will add a whole new level of staining on the deck that will have to be power-washed in the spring.
but then again, it’ll be SPRING, and washing a blueberry-stained deck sounds like good fun right now, as i sit here and watch the lone bird sitting out there in the cold. it’s a big dove, it’s not eating, it’s just sitting there looking all around.
ok, jut a brief interlude of sitting down on saturday – BACK TO WORK!
productive for once grace.