Michael Brown's Step Father investigated

[kentuckykingfisher]

I feed them sunflower seeds and some peanuts for the blue jays. I had a heart attack 5 years ago last March and decided that I needed a new hobby that was less stressful and that I could do easily. But now my eye sight is getting worse and it's hard to see. I just got back from the eye surgeon office today where he did another minor eye operation to try to correct my vision in one of my eyes. I have to have another operation on the other eye in a few weeks. That one will take a while to recover from. Maybe a year.

I buy the sunflower seeds at the big box stores in the bigger bags to save money. It's cheaper that way. I use to buy the smaller bags of all types of bird seed and that was expensive. Most all the birds that come to my feeders eat the sunflower seeds. The Morning Doves love them as do the cardinals. The other smaller birds even eat them. Some will pick up one seed and fly off to eat it and other's will stay at the feeder and eat a bunch of seed at one time. I've got a couple of books that help me ID the birds but they are hard for me to see unless I take a picture of them and look at it later. I can shoot them with an 18 megapixel Canon DSLR using a Nifty Two Fifty Lens from Cannon and they pictures look pretty good. I'd do more photography after I get my eye surgeries finished hopefully.

I got more interested in bird watching after I learned that they are the decedents of the dinosaurs. Now I look at a Blue Jay and try to see it as a miniature T Rex. LOL Imagine being a small bug or worm and having to fight off a Blue Jay or Crow? That would be like a human trying to outrun a 30 ft long T Rex 65 million years ago.

Did you know that dinosaurs remains have been found that shows that hey had feathers. Both the birds today and the Dinosaurs of years ago had hollow bones making them lighter in weight. This allows the birds to fly. And they are finding evidence that the dinosaurs were also warm blooded like the birds today.

Twice I use to live in a more secluded area but the surrounding land was developed and homes were built behind my homes. I lived on a street with only four house and just this last week they are building 4 more homes at the end of my dead end street. This is in addition to the other 12 houses already built in the last 20 years after I moved here.

I too feed the birds in the winter. I just feed them plain sunflower seeds. I have a wide variety but my favorite are the chickadees. Can't stand the blue jays because they bully the smaller birds and gorge themselves while not letting the others feed. I also have some woodpeckers that come get a easy meal. Last year I had one of those large Pileated woodpeckers hang around. I liked watching him swoop in and get a mouth full of seed and take off

[Moveon]

I too feed the birds in the winter. I just feed them plain sunflower seeds. I have a wide variety but my favorite are the chickadees. Can't stand the blue jays because they bully the smaller birds and gorge themselves while not letting the others feed. I also have some woodpeckers that come get a easy meal. Last year I had one of those large Pileated woodpeckers hang around. I liked watching him swoop in and get a mouth full of seed and take off

I've got a suet block for the wood peckers to feed on. I get all different types of the woodpeckers. And there is one big one with the red head on top but it's head feathers are more rounded. And it has little stubby legs too. I've seen a few other big woodpeckers around last year. One was the Pelated.

And yes the Blue Jays dominate the bird feeders but only at a few times of the day. I've had 6 Blue Jays come to the feeder at one time when I put the Shelled Peanuts out for them. And they will take unshelled peanuts too. They only stay for a few minutes and then leave. The other birds fly up into the trees around the back yard and wait their turn.

There is definitely a pecking order at the bird feeders. A few years ago I had a bunch of starlings that would invade the neighborhood in droves and I put the Gamo Pellet Gun to good use on them. And once in a while I used to get a flock of Big Black Birds eating the bird seeds. But after I got the scope fixed on my Gamo Air Rifle and got it zeroed in I started hitting and killing them left and right and so far this year I've not seen them return.

One of the coolest things I've seen is a hawk zoom down and catch one of the doves at the feeder. It happened so fast that I didn't really get to see much. The hawk was going very fast and snatched the dove right off the flat wooden platform that I screwed onto the corner of my deck rails. All that was left was a couple of dove downy feathers. The scene sort of reminded me of the start and end of the movie "Forest Gump". You know the scenes with the single feather floating in the air for a few minutes. That's was what I saw after the hawk was gone. My field of view looking though my back window was pretty narrow so I didn't see the hawk but for a fraction of a second as it zoomed though my narrow field of view.

Another time I got a short video and some still pictures of another hawk feeding on one of the dead black birds that I shot. I had left the bird in the yard under a tree and the hawk found it about 30 minutes later and was tearing it apart and eating the remains. Well that's one way to get rid of the dead blackbirds. I'm not sure if I can find the pictures on my computer easily but I know that they are there some where. I had a hard drive fail but I had the data backed up on another portable hard drive. So when I installed a new hard drive on my computer I tired to load the old back up data onto the new hard drive but it put all the data as another user. Now I've got three or four different user names on my hard drive and that makes it hard to find the files with the old pictures as I can't remember which user name has which files and the files are saved by dates so I have to open each folder name by date and the try to figure out which pictures are in each folder. I have many folders that are named by the date the pictures were saved. So it's a slow process to go though hundreds of different folders looking for the pictures I want to upload. So I don't really use the pictures much anymore. I have them all saved in my Photoshop Elements account but I don't use that anymore as the size of the text is tiny and I'm having major eye problems and can't read the small text anymore. I had cataract surgery recently on both eyes and can't see things up close anymore without reading glasses and I need to wait two more months before my eyes are ready to be fitted with eye glasses (bi focals). So until Adobe makes it possible to enlarge the text in their Elements Program so I can tell what I'm doing in that program I'm not messing with the pictures too much. I can still take them and store them in my cameras SDHC card but getting them into Adobe Photoshop Elements is much harder. Besides Adobe is just out for the money these days. They sell the Elements for 100 dollars and the main Adobe Photoshop Program for over $400. But each year they revise the Elements Program and add one or two new features to make it enticing to buy for another $100. But the time you update every few years you have spent over $400. So I skip the updates and only update every two or three years. I've got Adobe Photoshop Elements 2, 9 and 12. By the time I go out and buy a book on how to use the new program and start to read it the next version is released before I can get though the 2" thick book. I'm done with that stupid Adobe Game.

I must have three other photo shop type programs that I have tried to use to manage my digital photos. I'm typing this right now with the 200% Windows Text Setting so that I can see what I'm typing and see the text on the screen. With my high resolution screen resolution if I had the screen text size set to 100% I'd never be able to read the tiny text. At least Windows allows me to adjust the size of the text but Adobe Photoshop Elements 12 won't do that.

And also most of my pictures are taken with a 18 MB camera and are too large to upload without resizing them.

Testing one Red Headed Woodpecker Photo coming up! Hopefully it works and will upload. I spent twenty minutes trying to find this pictures.

[kygorski]

Before all the beef was shipped dressed to many stores, you could ask a butcher to save you some suet. i used to hang it around my main feeder in a near by tree. I also used to ground feed some birds like doves and quail. I didn't have a high tech camera, but did get one good picture of an oriole at the hummer feeder. the hummers would almost get in your hand while you filled the feeders, and they were always looking in the window when the feeders were nearing empty. the grackles are a pest in the spring, but a oaf or two of old bread will keep them away from the feeders. You can go to Lowes and get bags of dried meal worms, you can almost see the robins waiting for you. Also got a bird bath, that I try to keep open and filled in the winter. prettiest bird were the gross beaks, had 3 variities during the summer.