I started feeding birds in my retirement several years back.
Some deeper background ... which most of my avid(?) followers already know ... so they (you) can skip ...
I'm 73. I retired right after acute kidney a few days short of ten years ago which put me at 63. I was 64 that October, and I will be 74 this October ... and that's why this is titled "The Zen of ... ".
I grew up—until the end of the eighth grade—in and around Duluth, Minnesota. Summers there bring birds. And that's when I first started watching them. But I haven't watched them seriously, like taking it to a deeper level of understanding, until now.
Back to the first level of background ...
When I started feeding birds—again—several years back, I started paying attention to what I was doing, and not just let it flitter through my brain cells freely, like when I was a blond, blue-eyed boy running through our cows' grazing meadows on our small dairy farm thirty miles north of Duluth. This time I started learning some things, or let's say, remembering some of the things I was doing. Like if I put out a seed feeder for any length of time I would be overrun by house sparrows at the feeder above ground and doves (pigeons) on the ground below where the seeds would fall from the frantic feeding of the sparrows.
I discovered that I didn't have that problem with a suet feeder. I stored that information in the back of my mind and when spring came this year, along with the return of Goldfinches, I started—but not right away, it took awhile—putting out my suet bird feeder. It wasn't like I had planned it. It was more like acknowledging that I enjoyed working with birds. It got me out of bed one morning and I began my newest odyssey.
Anyway, to cut to the chase ... I am learning more about local birds, internet support for bird watching, and how to write about in my blog.
And I am working on improving the quality of my pictures, bit by bit and step by step. Here I am testing the difference between a bmp and jpg files (please note that captions are below the photos):
This is a bmp file. The birds are House Sparrows, with the more colorful one being the male.
This is the same picture except it is a jpg file.
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