re: #126 A Cranky One

We stopped bird feeding after the neighbors put out food that brought in tons of sparrows, since they drove away the other birds.

However, in winter we attract a lot of birds with a tray of water sitting on warming tape. It stays warm enough to not freeze, and so provides a source of drinking water in frozen weather.

My paranoid neighbor saw how sparrow flocks would fly away en masse and decided that it would be a good warning signal if people were trying to break into his garage. He really said this to me. He set about attracting as many sparrows as possible.

I had been making adjustments for years trying to attract all of the good birds (I had over a dozen feeders in the yard), and he wrecked it in one day. I tried to explain why he shouldn’t feed sparrows, and he threatened to call the cops for harassing him. We didn’t speak a word to each other for ten years.