This poor sunflower plant has had all its leaves stripped down to their vascular bundles (or whatever you call the veins). Not by grasshoppers; that was so 2007. No, I watched the culprits flocking all over the plant, eating till their little tummies bulged. They were tiny birds with greenish-yellow foliage, eating all the flower’s plumage (or whatever you call feathers and leaves). They seem fearless unless I am wearing a camera around my neck; that strikes fear into their little birdbrained hearts so I don’t have direct evidence of their crimes against sunflowers.
A nearby sunflower remains unscathed. Maybe the little birds were going after insects on the plant, and just happened to like a little salad with their meat. And scathed the poor thing to death.
2 comments:
I know!! I know!! The birds are finches, probably the Lesser Goldfinch. They seem to love sunflowers and related plants. I have watched them work on some of mine but never do such a complete skeleton job. Of course I never had a flock of them around--just Mom and Pop and maybe a couple of kids. Birds need their greens, right? Any insects are a bonus. They also peel back the seedcovers of flowers such as Clarkia unguiculata, but they never eat all the seeds.
That’s all fine and good. But in the meantime, what am I to do? Buy more expensive sunflower seeds for these voracious marauders? I thought growing fresh stuff for them without pesticides, using delicious well water and totally organic fertilizer (dead cats) would be the perfect expression of a balanced earth-friendly get-along-with-nature-as-God-intended philosophy. But they’re throwing me off my game.
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