Does Suet Suffocate Birds?

I hesitated to feed my birds suet in summer because of rumors that hot weather melts the suet on their beaks, and could stuff up their nostrils so they'll suffocate (they don't have fingers like you and I would use). Researching several birdfeeding sites, I tend toward the conclusion that it is not true. The suet I buy melts on my fingers, which are 98.6 degrees. Birds' body temperatures range from 104 to 109 degrees. People do say what WILL suffocate them is peanut butter, denser and with a higher melting point. Just as gobs of it might get stuck in our own throats, they might get stuck in a bird's throat, any time of year.

Wild birds love peanut butter, but mix it thoroughly with suet or lightly frost a pine cone with it so they can get only bits each time. I assume the risk is low, or there'd be more dead birds in people's backyards, but you don't want to murder your birds by accident.

I buy commercial suet, mixed with seeds. From experience I know it's much softer than natural or rendered suet. I also serve mixed dry seeds and fresh water daily. For the hummingbird feeders, weekly I use dish soap and water and scrub the drowned ants and mold out of them before refilling with fresh homemade nectar (1 part sugar to 4 parts boiling water, 3 parts if you want your hummers livin' large).

July Morning

With temperatures around 100 humid degrees at noon here in Missouri, the only time to go walking is before 7 a.m., when it's only about 80 degrees...down by where Doc Sargent Road intersects with F, right next to LaBarque Creek, it was all gold light this morning, with platinum mist and silver dew.

The Many Moods of LaBarque Creek

A one-lane bridge crosses a one-lane LaBarque Creek up the road just a bit, and I sat on the railing and looked at the dreamlike water, usually crystal-clear but chocolate-gelato-colored because an inch of rain fell the day before, and watched it sparkle in a setting of ultra-rain-soaked greenery, and I sighed because I am so in love with it and it is all I have ever wanted, and because it looked almost like a Japanese painting. I wanted to capture that and show you. Here's also a photo of the little bridge's warning. I sometimes crawl down the bank and when it's passable go hunchback beneath the bridge seeking fossils and crayfish, which survive only in very healthy streams. And I did once scoop up a glassy little crayfish hoping to show it to a friend. With its little toothpick arms it defended itself, pinching the palm of my hand (ow!), making me drop it back into the water.

You can't imagine how as a kid of about eight or nine I pined to sit by streams, to study their creatures, to watch the light on them, to listen to them. Instead I visited a vacant lot and after rains watched a rill that ran into a culvert, and listened to its trickling, and hoped that someday I could have what I have now.

Great Spangled Fritillary

This baby (Speyeria cybele) stopped me in my tracks. Never saw this butterfly before, although it is said to be common in the central U.S. Elbowed through waist-high grass to get photos and video, earning me 60 chigger bites, welts from knees to armpits; the itching was cured only with applications to the skin of diluted laundry bleach (1 part bleach to 7 parts water). That was Reeve's advice. It worked. The butterfly was worth it.

Fascinatingly, the Great Spangled Fritillary's scalloped wings look different on each side: dorsal side brown with orange and yellow, pretty but nothing special (see small photo); the contrasting ventral side is silver spots on coffee-and-cream. No fabric like this has ever been woven by man. Prefers to drink from purplish flowers, and I caught this one on horsemint and, in a separate series of photos, also on coneflowers. Difficult to ID, but this website helped me and maybe you can use it too. The Great Spangled Fritillary: I couldn't have named it better. What's a fritillary? A butterfly with tiny front legs that have no claws. Everybody else's front legs have claws. If the photos are greatly enlarged it can be seen that their front legs aren't good for clinging to anything.

Three Cheers for the Blue

Hiking, tramping along, winded, hoping to find the trail's end soon, hating to stop and rest because only old folks need to stop and rest -- been hiking 40-some years now --and anyway I'm getting dehydrated and need to drink water ASAP (am lazy sometimes about lugging along all the water I might need) and so I asked myself,"What would John Muir do?" Dehydration disorients me, so I looked down at my feet to make sure they were moving. Right then I glimpsed something crisp and refreshingly blue in the earth right in front of me, and saw that a baby had been born. Looked hard to try to identify the bird, but many birds lay blue eggs. Because the egg is spotted, I count robins out, and because of the location in deep woods I count bluebirds out; both robins and bluebirds are field-loving birds. Possibly some kind of sparrow. I wished it a happy birthday.

Three Cheers for the Red

Crocheted tire cover photographed in the Wal-Mart parking lot in Eureka, MO. Don't that beat all. It's beautiful, too.

Rabbits, Rabbits, Rabbits

An old superstition says: On the first day of every month, the first thing you should say aloud is "Rabbits, rabbits, rabbits." This brings good luck. My rigorous testing has proved it absolutely true. This young bunny breakfasts and dines in my yard, and over the past month I have been trying to gain its trust, quietly inching closer to get better photos of it. Please, politely disregard the quite obvious fact that I have neglected to mow my yard.