An Easter Sunday for the birds

It was a rainy Easter Sunday.
Lingering at the kitchen table, I stared into the back yard.
Much of it was soggy, and some of it was covered with puddles.
I’d mowed the front yard on Saturday, but the back was too wet then.
Now, it looked as if it would be the end of the week before it would be dry enough to address.
A pair of robins — Mr. and Mrs.? — hopped along the brick section of the patio, pulling worms from the cracks between the bricks.
The weather seemed to suit them fine.
At the very least, it kept most of the neighborhood cats indoors for a change.
Grackles moved insolently through the grass. Mourning doves huddled in shelter from the weather.
A brown creeper moved up and down an ash tree.
Back toward the picket fence that my neighbor Roger built, a wren perched on one of our trellises then swooped over to a feeder located behind Roger’s garage.
With luck it will hang around a build a nest for the summer.
There are three birdfeeders in the back yard these days.
There have been as many as five, but the squirrels had a field day with a couple of them.
The squirrels have also been doing their best to get into a sunflower seed feeder hanging from our garage. It fooled them for about a year.
Then this winter, one of them figured out how to get it open. He’d then hang upside down in it, feasting on the seeds.
We’ve tried to outfox them this spring, wiring it shut.
So far it seems to be working.
The chickadees and nuthatches appreciate that.
As I watched, a chickadee sampled the sunflower seeds. The feeder was nearly empty.
On Good Friday, a rufous-sided towhee visited us for the afternoon, making his annual migration to who knows where. We see one just about every spring but only for about a day.
And about 10 days before, a pair of tufted titmice entertained me, zipping from feeder to feeder and from branch to branch while I had a bowl of soup.
More rain dripped down. The sun was nowhere to be seen.
By all rights, it should have been a gloomy scene.
But as I lingered at the table, I found it impossible to stay gloomy.
After all, it was time to fill the feeders.[[In-content Ad]]