By KAREN MADORIN
Regular readers know we love our yard’s inhabitants. Our robins, orioles, finches, sparrows, and kingbirds both western and eastern fascinate us. Like proud grandparents, we ooh and aah over nesting parents and their fledglings. This year, we’ve enjoyed western kingbirds raising young in our mulberry tree. Unfortunately, a young squirrel who’s made our seed stations, bird baths, and shady ash tree his restaurant, libation source, and climbing gym finds them aggravating.
Living at the edge of town, we don’t encourage coyotes, foxes, deer, or other wildlife to roam through the yard. However, we do welcome a cottontail who lives under our shed, a frisky teenage squirrel, and birds both local and passers-through to stop at feeders and waterers. That frisky tree-climber tickles our funny bones with his silly antics and photogenic poses.
Our before supper ritual requires sitting on the deck watching critters and laughing at their antics. No one takes a splashy bath better than a robin. As much as I wish grackles chose other yards to call home, their attitudinal chest puffing grows on me--like watching a bird version of WWE wrestling. House finches delight us with polite feeding and gentle social graces. Orioles can’t help but brighten anyone’s day when males show up in brilliant orange and black tuxedos accompanied by mates wearing drab browns and pale yellows to feast on garden insects. But the ones that make you catch your breath and squeal at acrobatic dives and swift in-air snagging and eating of flying insects are king birds. Making life more exciting, these territorial wonders attack anything that dares come within 20 feet of their nest. Our little squirrel could tell more than one story about their dastardly dives on trespassers.
We had no idea the king birds would nest where they did nor did we know a squirrel would make itself welcome in our yard, so earlier in the spring my husband secured a corn feeder to our locust tree to tempt passing bushytails.
Though we’ve watched both western and eastern kingbirds arrive in April, we didn’t observe nest building behavior. Each year, they feast on insects flying over the farm field behind us and over our garden, but they’ve never selected our tree as their nursery. This year we won the backyard fun lottery, getting a kingbird nest in the mulberry tree next to the locust that hosts our squirrel feeder.
That poor squirrel. He’d love to dig into those golden kernels of tasty carbs, but the king birds ferociously attack before he ever arrives at the locust tree base. From the moment those tyrants of the sky spy him closing on his target, they put a bull’s-eye on him. Functioning like heat-seeking missiles, they dive close enough they mess up his fur. If he’s wily enough to make it to the trunk and start climbing, they quintuple their efforts.
I stood at the kitchen window one morning, sipping my morning brew and cheering that squirrel on. If he could make it to the jar feeder, he could crawl in its hole, feast as long as he wanted out of those tenacious warriors’ reach, and then leap out and race away to escape their wrath.
Despite my encouragement from inside the house, the tree rat gave up before reaching his goal and scampered off full-throttle with two nattering kingbirds literally on his tail. I hope he keeps trying.