As mentioned in previous posts, my yard has become heavily populated with wildlife of all kinds. Squirrels especially. Years ago, a pair of mockingbirds had an annual nest in the pyracantha bushes along the fence. Squirrels ran through their territory regularly. Those were the times when we would catch more than one squirrel a day in the traps. After a time, I noticed that whenever I went to move these traps, the mockingbirds would fly overhead and along the fence not too far away. I just assumed they were happy to be rid of one more squirrel.

Eventually, the birds were defeated, and moved away. I miss their songs, even the ones in the middle of the night.

In residence and busily raising their family are a pair of towhees. Extremely shy, they have recently begun coming to the feeder more regularly. They are the last to feed at night, and when I’ve gone out to retrieve the feeder tray, they can be heard nearby chirping away. So I leave the food out a little longer.

In the last few days, two large black squirrels and assorted smaller gray ones have been leaping up on the tables. (Seriously cutting into my Wii time.) The black ones avoid the traps as if they’ve been caught before and somehow gotten out. Finally, a few minutes ago, a gray one found the peanut-butter covered nuts too irresistible. I went out to cover it up, and took a stroll around the garden. The towhee pair flew past down low.

I went out front to plant some pansies. The towhees came out there too. Not real close, but keeping me in sight. Did they make the connection between the food and me? Their nest is low in the arbovitae, and I’ve seen squirrels run in there, so maybe they recognize the removals are to their benefit.

Now if I can only get the three doves to hang around me.

At least six, and sometimes a house finch manages to get a spot too till it is overwhelmed by the goldfinches, who eat all day long. This male was eating peacefully alongside another male, which certainly doesn’t happen very often.

Underneath the sock feeder is a pile of black seeds and their hulls. The doves and juncos pick through them.

Near the end of next month, I will move my laptop and camera gear outside, and then we’ll see how close they’ll let me get.

Possibly the most retiring of the menagerie. It was all I could do to set up the tripod and camera (open door, equipment inside) without spooking it. And that, of course, is why it is not in focus. This is also from video. But it craned its neck so it could check out the camera and me for a few seconds before taking off.

There are three of them, one bullies the other two, so maybe it’s not a pair with their young one, but a male and two wives. Now I’m trying to get used to big shadows across the yard as they fly back and forth, but they get closer each day.

Next thing I know, there’ll be a dove or two in here making those frantic twittering sounds which seem to be their normal mode. We will scare each other to death, no doubt.

Readers will note that the blog is mostly concerned with birds now. What started out as a small tray on an old table with two or three juncos and a few chickadees has turned into something completely different.

Over time, a titmouse and a very shy wren would make an appearance, quickly disappearing when intimidated by the juncos. The towhees built a nest in Mr. Maria’s trees, and raised their family on cornmeal suet. A very large flock of sparrows forced me to shut down the feeder till they lost interest. More juncos came by. The resident hummingbird defended his feeder fiercely. A lone Townsend’s warbler visited late in the year and stayed.

This year, the chickadee pair seems to have only one baby. Mourning doves have a nest in the honeysuckle, and while fleeing at shadows, land on the table. During dinner on Sunday, one settled down for a rest right next to the food bowl, watching us as we ate inside. It stayed there a long time. (I have witnesses.) The towhee pair not only lands on the table, but also on the smaller table right against the wall. A phoebe comes to the yard but not to the feeder, being an insectivore, and a grosbeak eats seeds that fall on the patio. Robins have a nest either in the street oaks or a neighbor’s yard, and stop by now and then. A house finch feeds on the finch sock along with at least six goldfinches. The hummingbird I named Sparky has died, I’m afraid, but has left such a force field around his feeder that few hummers even dare to stop there, and then only briefly. The wren has become so familiar and content that it too flew inside (as did the juncos and a chickadee), and exited in a timely fashion.

All this occurs in a very small space of the patio and surrounding semi-grassy area. I am constantly amazed, and if I didn’t have a stringent deadline of June 30 for a large project, I would be sitting outside filming all this, especially the goldfinches, who have a most picturesque lifestyle.

These activities have been going on for almost two years. In that time, the birds have become quite used to me, most particularly the chickadees. They know how to get my attention to get mealworms out of the box outside. I will swear that they have a meaningful look.

Lately, the squirrels are back, leaping up on the tables, knocking things down, and the black ones have figured out the traps. I have watched as they smell the nuts inside, nose all around, try to reach for them with their paws, and can actually remove them if the trap is set on the ground. They go all around, even on top, but avoid the opening. But I can’t fend them off all the time.

This morning, I was deep in work when a chickadee landed on the bush in front of the window where I work. This is nothing unusual, they do this all the time, usually to chip away at a piece of suet or a mealworm. But this chickadee was giving me the Meaningful Look. I stared back, said hello, went back to work. It persisted with this look, bobbing back and forth a bit, then kind of moved its wings out a little. That’s when I saw the black squirrel on the small table next to the wall, big chunk of suet in its paws, eating away.

So, message sent, message received. I ran the squirrel off, and everything went back to normal.

The pair is finally making regular appearances at the feeding table, taking the cornmeal suet, but much hesitating and apprehension. I don’t dare try to photograph them yet, they startle so easily.

Yesterday morning, I glanced out, debating whether to bring the feeder closer to the house since it was sprinkling. To one side, there was a pale blue egg similar to the plastic miniature eggs I’d been using as Easter photo props. Being so light, they were frequently blown off the table. I assumed the family member found one on the ground, and put it there for safekeeping.

But when I picked it up, it was much heavier than the plastic eggs. The only answer was that the female towhee somehow laid this while eating or while being startled. (I looked it up, the only other sizable bird that comes to the table is the mourning dove. This resembles more the towhee egg.)

So I figured if I put it in their nest, they would abandon it and any other eggs already there. It’s probably illegal to be in possession of this egg. Meanwhile, depending on how long it had been out there, it was no longer a viable egg anyway. But the family member, who gets up at dawn, did not see it earlier. So there was the chance it was a freshly laid egg.

While I pondered all these issues, I put it in a prop nest, and put it under a lamp.

For the last few days, work has been very intense and I’ve been unable to take photos or footage of the birds. The goldfinch mesh sock has attracted what amounts to a small flock that seems to eat constantly, and the pile of seed hulls underneath is thankfully blown away each afternoon when the wind picks up.

I’ve left the mealworm container (a transparent plastic box) out on another table. Just now, a chickadee lands on it and walks all around, inspecting the contents. The titmouse has given up on the possibility of live food, and hacks away at the cornmeal suet to feed its brood.

A hummingbird that is not Sparky comes daily to the deer scare fountain to take a bath. Now this is amazing to watch. The goldfinches also visit the water, and take frequent drinks, sometimes a bath as well. The family member says we have sparrow hawks in the redwood tree. I think there is a juvenile in the neighbor’s pine tree, and spotted it one afternoon as it flew across the court.

Last week I bought a bluebird house.

For a couple of months, it seems, the two towhees have been trying to build a home in the large but dead arborvitae. I have a great view of this bush. Maybe the squirrels get in there and tear their efforts down. There is constant construction, and as late as last week, they brought in long pieces of grass and twigs.

Their parents would regularly empty out the cornmeal suet container last year, raising at least three offspring. However, they failed to teach them where the human-provided foods came from. Despite numerous comings and goings all day long of chickadees, juncos, wrens, titmouse, and most recently, mourning doves, the towhees don’t land on the table. They will look under the table and all over the patio, which is mostly covered now in nyger seed hulls from the constant eating by the goldfinches.

This morning, the male towhee took a giant leap forward. It looked terrified while pecking at the seeds. Later, it took a big clump of suet, retiring to the patio to eat. I can’t wait to film them when they come swooping in when the nestlings get hungry.

I used to get terrible photos of the hummingbird till the feeder was moved into a brighter spot. Maybe this will happen tomorrow when I don’t have 10,000 other things to do.

Turnabout’s fair play, as they say. I’m always shooting chickadees outside, and today, one of them decided to check out what I do in here.

Yes, those are cobwebs on its feet. I tried to keep it away from the windows, but it just wouldn’t listen. At first I thought it was the baby chickadee, but it seems to be the male parent. The male will not land on my hand, but the female will. Although given the stress of the situation, she probably wouldn’t have either.

It kept going to the base of the window even though I pleaded and tried to coax it out with mealworms. There it goes again.

When the juncos came in, they looked over all the equipment I use, and got out of here in a hurry. The chickadee decided it would stick around.

I remembered the butterfly net in the garage. Please, please, I thought, let it not be the one with the hole in it.

It wasn’t. The family member came home, and managed to escort the chickadee outside in the net. It flew off into the oak tree where it lives. Where it is probably currently soaking in the tub, trying to get rid of all that stuff on its feet, and regaling the family with his strange adventure. I hope he remembered to tell them that there were refreshments.

The other night a raccoon apparently entered the trap we set for squirrels (not the first time this has happened). When it was unable to exit in a timely manner, it called in the troops. One must have strapped on his handy tool belt. Next morning, I noticed that the trap was turned around and not where it was left the day before.

I asked the family member if he moved it. He said no. When I tried to reset the trap, an important part of the trapping mechanism didn’t work. As if something took a pair of raccoon pliers and loosened it. When the family member returned from work, he made adjustments, but he failed to take into account the technical expertise of raccoons, especially the ones who go to college on a tools scholarship.

It happened that for the past week, I had been troubled by a pack of squirrels who kept jumping on the bird feeding table. I then placed the big trap right under this table. Caught one, waited to catch the other two. And that evening was the night of the raccoon gathering.

After the human adjusting, I baited the trap the next day. Sometime in the afternoon, the loud metallic sound of the trap was heard, which tends to make me leap up almost like the squirrel does. I looked, and indeed, there was one of the gray squirrels. Usually, I put a towel, tarp or some such over the trap, which calms the animal down till it is deposited in parklands not close to here. I neglected to do this because I had a lot of work.

When I got up to get a tarp, the trap looked empty. Sometimes, if the angle is right and the squirrel is crouched in the corner eating the walnuts in there, it can look empty. But no, this time, it was really empty, and the squirrel was pausing at the open door, seconds from entering the house.

Part of the trap door had been loosened in such a way as to be undetected by mere humans. But the raccoons had figured out a way to let the next animal get loose on its own.

I bow to their superior intelligence in matters of the trap.

For my nonbirding readers, goldfinches will feed from these mesh ’socks’ filled with tiny nyger seeds. It took them a day or so to find it. So far, I’ve only seen one, but I know there is at least one pair in the yard. This one fed from the other side of the sock this morning.

Because I’m always staring at the monitor, it’s fortunate that some birds, like this one, will announce its arrival. A clear whistling sound signals a visit, while the titmouse makes a rasping, harsh call, but is sometimes more melodic. When there are fresh mealworms in the feeder, the titmouse is no longer hesitant or mindful of the camera. The goldfinches will just have to get used to the many comings and goings, bird and human alike.