We have 2 pairs of brown thrashers in our yard this year. I love them. They have the most hilarious song, it is like they are going through a big list of song clips from other birds, rapid-fire, one after another. Some mornings and evenings they just don't shut up. :D I think they are good birds..they eat lots of bugs. Haven't had any swoop at us yet and I'm sure we walk fairly close to their nest at times!

OK, this is a wild-card solution, but it works for those with an appetite for homesteading and keeping chickens or ducks. IMO, putting up an 8 foot fence is MUCH harder/heavier work than putting up a 6 foot fence. If you're having pros do it - no problem. 6' isn't enough. BUT - deer are fearful of a double fence, it's hard to gauge the distance for jumping. So I did a double 6' fence around my garden, with the two fences 3' apart (and some white cotton 'flags' tied to both fences so they could see it). I used that enclosure for my chicken run. When working in the garden I tossed weeds etc. into the run, and the chickens loved scratching through it, eating part and shredding/turning it as they explored for bugs and turn it into compost. If you use ducks, they'll catch & eat every single slug trying to cross their run to get to your garden. At the end of the season, turn the chickens or ducks into the garden to give it a going over. They'll find most of the bugs that wanted to over-winter and eat them. After the chickens have had fun in the garden at the end of harvest, clean their run and coop, spreading all of that compost over the top of the garden to mulch it and finish breaking down over the winter. (If you use true deep bedding for your flock and keep layering in flakes of straw, you only need to clean it once a year. If it smells, you're not using enough straw. There should NEVER be an odor.)

Who does the cooking, you or your husband? If you do the cooking, then cook some things you like and some things he likes. If he doesn't want to eat them, then too bad. Let him fix a PBJ. I come from the old school where we were poor and we ate a lot of fresh veggies which were cheap or home grown. If he gets hungry enough he will eat whatever is cooked and will soon learn to like it. We raised two kids and two grandkids who eat veggies and love them. Too many people cook veggies such as tasteless boiled yellow squash, boxed plain mashed potatoes. Yuck. Try frying breaded yellow squash with onions. Fried green tomatoes in panko breadcrumbs. Squash croquettes. Serve white rice with milk and browned flour gravy made from the fat of fried pork chops. Mashed or creamed potatoes with the au jus gravy made from a pot roast (floured and browned) cooked with onions, celery and carrots. Green beans seasoned with salt pork or ham hocks. If he has good veggies he will eat them. Go to Foodnetwork and look for Paula Deen veggie recipes. She cooks good, Southern style veggies. If you notice, many of them use a meat of some kind in the cooking process. When I was up North, I got so tired of tasteless boiled veggies. You have to make them taste good.

There is a park, a small field that is regularly mowed, and a sort of a wet-weather slough that runs between four properties (one of which is ours). It's basically what's left when a developer is too lazy to properly landscape when they build a plat on uneven terrain. There may be only one of the females; We've been away for awhile and I've not yet seen her again since we got back. Apparently my female house sparrows have lost their itty-bitty minds and have taken to scattering the seed from the window feeder far and wide, which has finally given the grackles something they can get at. The grackles are making things a little more difficult for everyone else and I wonder if they've driven her off. So I'll not be filling the window feeder any more - then we'll see if Ms. RWBB comes back or no, LOL!