How I discovered cheap domestic labor

I was living in my house for a few years before I began to wonder why I never heard bird song around my home in southeastern Colorado.

If you have ever lived in eastern Nebraska you know what it is like to wake up shortly before dawn and hear a rising chorus of birdsong that climaxes right at sunrise.

I heard that symphony over and over the summer we lived in Seward, Nebraska.  At the moment of climax, the birds would erupt in one final loud collective bird shout - and a squirrel would suddenly race across our roof.

It is something that has to be heard... it is hard to communicate how mystical and intense these morning bird chants were and likely still are.

I would wake up most mornings and hear this rising chorus of bird song that got louder and louder until that climactic moment.  And what prompted the squirrel to clatter across the roof at the peak moment I have no idea but I guess it was just an appreciative listener exploding with applause.

While eastern Nebraska is the second major flyway for birds in the United States, the dry plains of eastern Colorado don't have the songbirds of the deeper Midwest.  We do have lots of sparrows. And crows and starling. The occasional woodpecker can be heard tapping on my trees in winter. If you go out to the Bent's Fort Inn, where a previous encouraged a bird refuge, birds can be heard singing and chirping.

It occurred to me that birds never hung around my place to chirp or flitter because they had no reason to.

So I started putting out bird seed.  That did the trick.  Now they start flitting around the two feeders and peck on the ground where I scatter seed because some birds are ground feeders.

Some mornings I sit on my porch, like I did today, and watch the birds come and go.  The morning doves  fly in with grace and loud caws to drive away lesser members of their tribe. I also keep cat food on the front porch and lately a robin will sneak in to steal kitten chow I put in a food dish. He's putting one over on me, like a cat thief.

Before too long though I noticed the birds caused damage.  If some seed was put out under the tree the ground underneath was quickly churned up to dust.

Because our side of the street has no clearly defined curb and gutter, our properties just extend from our houses out to an undefined border where paving begins toward  the middle of the road. Last year a patch of grass and weeds was diligently watered to create some green buffer between my lawn, which last year was mostly a sunflower patch on the south side of my lawn.

But as the drought intensifies here, I decided to reduce my watering this year. That patch of grass and weeds toward the street parallel to the mailbox would have to go.

So over the winter I began scattering seed every day over that patch of grass and the birds would show up and scratch and peck.  Now that area is neatly groomed, thanks to the birds.

I found a way to put the birds to work and make them earn their food.

Now there is a ragged edge of grass and weed on the south edge of my unpaved rural driveway, so this morning I scattered seed there to give my feathered friends a new task. When I sat out on the porch birds would come to the normal feeding area and walk around and peck - I guess at small stones as the seeds were already gleaned.

Eventually though I expect them to discover their new work area.

And this cheap labor isn't imported either.  Just home grown American birds who are proving they want to work.  And they'll work for bird feed.