Ah...somebody worse than me

Unless you are a regular reader here, you might not be aware of just how much I agonize over the irritation my Bird Park causes Mr. Lee. I feel bad. I really do. It's too much for this kind of neighborhood. We should move to a funky place in the country. I even feel bad for my fussy neighbor when he runs the birds off so recently I cut the seed back by 2/3s to reduce the visitors I get in a day. So far, I just can't bring myself to stop feeding them altogether. I would be very lonely without them hopping around looking for goodies, feeding their squawking babies, taking cold tubs, dirt baths, singing. Even the little skirmishes that break out are entertaining because nobody really gets hurt. Now Mr. Lee has stopped bitching so much and I haven't seen old Dick out there shooing everybody away so, for the moment, we are back in a groove.

I don't want to sound like a bad neighbor but I'm not too worried about Dick anyway. He lost the moral high ground while we were gone by doing his own bad neighbor thing. He nailed an ugly towering pole to his side of the fence and it is directly and exactly across from my office window. It has to stand at least 12 feet above the fence. Tacky. This is not the first time Dick has infringed on the fence line in our boxed in, back to back little piece of burb heaven. A few years ago the people over his back fence demanded he take down the row of corny brilliantly colored faux birdhouses that he builds in his garage for god knows who. They are the kind of thing you might consider cooling a friendship down over just to avoid getting one as a Christmas present and certainly no self-respecting bird would ever consider living in one.

At first I thought the stick was some kind of rattle that he could shake from his back porch and scare all the birds out of my yard whenever he felt like it but now I don't think so. I suspect it's just part of his ham radio operation. Okay. Fine. He used to use a frequency that broadcast over our computer speakers. At random hours of the day and night we'd startle to a crackly "This is Lazy Dog in Northern Nevada, Northern Nevada" ... (always very drawn out on the Northern) ... over and over again blindly groping the airwaves for someone to talk at. The guy is an incessant talker. Even his own wife avoids him. That was annoying. I wish he were the deaf one then he wouldn't notice the birds so much but the deaf neighbor lives on the other side of us.

Anyway, I just learned today there is at least one person in the world who, when it comes to feeding wildlife, is more incorrigible than me; the wife of a friend of ours who recently turned her backyard into a Bear Park.

He always complained about how crazy she was and how hard he worked to contain her obsession with feeding everything that walks, crawls, or flies within a half mile of their place. That's why it was a bit surprising when he told us that she told him that the local rangers told her to put nuts and berries squirted with fish oil out for the bears and he is going along with it. Now bears are cavorting around their backyard all day long, lounging and napping and waiting for the next meal and, of course, more and more bears are showing up all the time. I sympathize because it's been a bad year for the bears, not enough berries, and they are starving and getting killed by cars as they wander further and further down the Sierra in search of food ... although a friend of mine who works for the Nevada Highway Division assures me that, in general, the garbage bears are doing well because people don't bother to get bear-proof garbage cans like they are supposed to ... but this ... the Bear Park ... this cannot end well.