It's snowing today - not as heavily as the big storm from a couple of weeks ago, but it's still coming down enough to limit visibility and make things challenging for man and beast. I'm interested in how the beasts are coping.
To help the birds in my backyard, I not only have feeders and a heated birdbath, but I've also made sure they have shelter. Trees and bushes are important as places for the birds to seek refuge from weather and from predators.
But another way I give them shelter is through brushpiles - a mound of branches of various sizes stacked about two feet high and three feet long. The birds, especially house sparrows, jump back and forth in and out of the branches, sometimes looking for food, other times getting away from the hawks that show up looking for a meal.
Today, I spotted the birds making use of another spot in the yard for their shelter. In anticipation of maple syruping in March, I started stockpiling wood that I can use for the fire to boil the sap into syrup. The wood is stacked up on pallets and covered with a tarp. This morning, I spotted house sparrows and juncoes hopping in and out of the fire wood pile.
Adaptable and curious, birds do what it takes to survive in Minnesota's changable weather.
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