Acer rubrum To Zyzyphus jujuba
Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams
Chronicles of a Footloose Forester
By Dick Pellek

It Pays To Read Labels

Advertisers have been doing it for decades.  Putting nutritional information on milk cartons and cereal boxes, assembly instructions on the back of pre-fabricated office furniture pieces, and even pictures of the birds that your freshly purchased bag of bird seed will attract.  Thank you, Royal Wing brand of bird seed, for the colorful pictures of the species of birds that are attracted to the nyjer seed in the woven plastic bag that we recently purchased.

It has been said before in these Chronicles of a Footloose Forester, but it bears repeating once again….truth is stranger than fiction.  Were it not for the combined photo of a goldfinch, a purple finch, and a pine siskin on the bag; the Footloose Forester might not have learned to identify a pine siskin.  But a few days after the finch feeder was filled with nyjer seed from that bag, three distinctly different species of bird came to feed at the same time.  There were two goldfinches, a purple finch...and two pine siskins.  Truth is stranger than fiction.

The finch feeders shown above are quiet now, but the birds will be back.  We hope that when they return, those visitors will be goldfinches, purple fiches, and pine siskins.