Blog de Puree

This afternoon, we were alerted to some feathered visitors to the yard by the staccato meow of our cat. This is his way of communicating when he goes into “hunt mode.”

Looking out the back door from our kitchen, a flock of European Starlings, with their telltale white spots, swarmed around various piles of sunflower seeds in the back yard and a brick of thistle feed we put up on the back fence.

Randye, the cat and I watched out the door and every slight movement we made set the birds into a blur of instinctive, reactionary motion. It was similar to watching a large school of fish, such as minnows or herring, that seems to move in unison, darting this way and that–a giant blur of color and motion. The birds would quickly settle back down to the ground and start pecking at seed again.

We don’t see the starlings all the time in are area, but the spotted birds are a welcome diversion from the usual flock of house sparrows that lives in the neighborhood and often chases some of the less common birds away.