Love it,hope you get a cup and saucer up there with it,that would look so good :) Did you make the bench from a chair or a headboard? I really like it a lot! Everything looks great :)

You can always try hanging the feeders independent of the trees. A post set into the ground with hooks for the feeders or the shepherd's crooks they sell specifically for this purpose would prevent any damage hanging feeding appliances directly to a tree might incur. As to the pros and cons of feeding birds.......I agree with Dan on this one. Expanding development has restricted/removed many of the natural habitats and food sources and encouraging birds to the garden is overall a very good thing - they are the best natural insect control available! Plus, they are infinitely entertaining. Planting to encourage habitat and to supplement food sources is desirable, but nothing wrong with feeders either. They can bring the birds up close and personal :-)) If you want songbirds, try a "no-waste" mix. Even if it gets scattered on the ground, it gets eaten too fast to hang around to attract rodents. And sapsucker damage to trees is generally more cosmetic than particularly harmful. Since they have a 'preferred' tree menu, you can always avoid attracting them by not planting the trees they like. And as they tend to limit their diet to insects and tree sap, with supplementation from fruits and berries - the seed feeders are unlikely to create additional problems.

Because the others are females and they are his harem? Maybe all the other males are out buying beer for Super Bowl Sunday? Maybe all the other males are sleeping off their pre-Super Bowl party celebrations last night? I don't know why you only have one male, but here at our house the females always outnumber the males. Often the males eat early in the day and the females eat later. Female redwings don't really look that much like the males, so it is easy to tell that you have more females than males. Lots of people don't even realize the females are female redwings and think they are something else. Yesterday, in a rather odd form of behavior, the males were going mad over the cattail seedheads, and the females weren't. I have no idea what that means. I see a pretty similar gender segregation with the cardinals too. The males come in big groups of 10 or 12 or 15 to eat. Later on, the females come in smaller groups of 2, 3, 4 or 5. I wonder why. Finally, how about the deer and the way they feed. Our does and fawns, even the young males, come together in a group. They eat first. The minute our really big buck shows up, all the others scatter. It isn't that the buck is aggressive and pushes them away from the food. In fact, he stands in the neighbor's pasture about 20' from where the deer are feeding and waits patiently. He never comes to the food and nudges them away from it. However, from the moment he shows up, all the others are antsy and nervous and hungrily snatch a few more bites before quickly leaving together as a group. Respect for the buck's superior size and strength? Fear? Who knows what it is, but it is interesting to watch. Dawn

I almost posted an observation along these lines several weeks ago. In a one-week span I noticed three separate cowbird chicks all being attended to by blue-grey gnatcatchers. There was always a single cb chick to each set of birds, and never any sign of additional BGGC chicks vying for the food. In that same time span I also noticed a CBchick being fed by a pair of indigo buntings. It's not hard to find them as they are very raucous and conspicuous. I am curious how the numbers and densities of birds most typically affected by CB predations are doing here because we have hordes of cowbirds, yet I always hear/see vireos and thrushes and others that are prime targets for parasitism. I check my nest boxes regularly and destroy any CB eggs in the hopes that at least my small wooded acreage can better sustain songbirds in a time of decline, but we live in farmland with any remaining wooded areas being highly fragmented. Flocks of winter 'blackbirds' are usually groupings of redwings, starlings, grackles and cowbirds fattened up on a steady and readily available farmland diet. I only wonder what our songbird demographics will do in the next few decades.