White crowned sparrows

So it has been a rough winter by all accounts and some feel that it is still going on. Daytime temps are about 5 - 10 degrees below normal (and while I am sure that the crowd who does not believe in global warming will be chimping about about this, the fact is that they are not the sharpest tacks in the box), and the yard took a bit of a beating. The grass is looking patchy out front and while at first I was hoping that it would come back on it's own eventually real life had to rear it's head and I just had to come to terms with the fact that my lawn needed help. Re-seed help, to put it accurately so I hit the local grass seed emporium and bought a big jar of shade resistant grass seed.

I sprayed the seed all over the rough patches out front, raked it in and watered the heck out of it and then waited for my shiney new lawn to blast out of the ground. Weeks later (weeks!) nothing was happening and I have to admit to a certain level of puzzlement, then one day I noticed that my front lawn looked like it was moving. I snapped off a picture figuring that I could get on one of those weird story TV shows. Then while I reset the camera to 'movie mode' (figuring that a moving picture might be a little more exciting on TV than a bunch of stills) I noticed that it was a bunch of birds roaming through my lawn, eating my seed. White-crowned sparrows, in fact. Now my first impulse was to find a cat and toss it out there but I have never been a fan of the knee-jerk reaction, so I looked the little beggers up on the Internet and discovered that this is their breeding time. I am all for breeding so I figured that I should help the little mutts instead of exterminating the brutes, so I left them alone. I don't know how much energy a bird gets from a seed of grass, but if that works for them I can afford to help.

Anyway... Humouroceros

The picture at the top is from wildbird.com which is a pretty good web-site. The picture at the bottom is where I had hoped to have lawn in my front-yard. Maybe next year. It's like the Canucks fans say, "this was a building year."