Birds and bees

This morning I fed the cats, as usual. Then I saw the hummingbird feeder was empty so I mixed up some nectar and refilled it - after hosing it down to get rid of the ants. I had neglected to keep water in the ant moat and a "thousand" ants were having a party. Then I saw the pond fish were all staring at me waiting for their meal...well it seemed like it at least, so I tossed in a handful of fish food and they gulped it up. I tend to forget about the fish because they get a lot of natural food from the pond. I had bought about 10 inexpensive feeder fish a year or so ago and thought they'd all died because we never saw them. Then last spring we suddenly saw fish in the pond. Either someone snuck in and restocked it or seven of the feeder fish hid out under the waterfall for a year. While I was standing on the patio watching the fish eat their breakfast, a hummer hovered about 2 feet from my face. I was happy to see him but a bit startled - the blur of his wings and the long, pointy beak were a little too close! I guess he wanted to drink from the feeder and I was in his way. We've had a large number of hummingbirds in our yard this year. We have lots of flowers for them to feed off of so I don't normally keep the feeder full. However last month I filled it with the leftover sugar syrup from canning peaches and since then it seems we've been the rest stop on the hummingbird migration highway.

The plants and pond in our yard attract lots of birds and bees. We've seen some HUGE carpenter bees that could pass for small hummingbirds! If there were more room in the yard, we'd probably have bee hives and maybe chickens. I'd like a goat too. And maybe rabbits. That would be fun. A lot of work though.