All the critters in my neck of the woods know that our place is the place to go if you want to eat. We feed 'em all. Squirrels, a gazillion types of birds, raccoons (unintentionally), and even rats (COMPLETELY UNINTENTIONALLY!). Oh yeah, and humans. I've heard people joke that I like to cook as if I'm feeding an entire army.

Yeah, so? I don't want anyone to go hungry. Sue me.

I take this responsibility very seriously (except for the raccoons and rats), so you can imagine my dismay when I saw my poor hummingbirds unsuccessfully trying to feed out of a completely frozen feeder.

I did a google search, because surely there was something you can do about frozen hummingbird food. Turns out that typically, the hummingbirds migrate south before it gets to the point of freezing. If they haven't, then they depend on suckers humans to feed them.

Ahem.. that'd be me.

So, after obsessing about the poor starving hummingbirds (I have four that I know of), I decided to trudge out into the freezing cold (barefoot and walking for miles and miles, by the way) to retrieve the hummingbird feeder.

I brought it in, melted the ice, and replaced it with warm sugar water.

I caught some great photos of a couple of VERY happy hummingbirds, once I replaced the feeder.


More pictures can be found on my flickr site.

Now, the next issue is that I'm out of regular bird food and am not brave enough to go down my driveway to the store.

Just another thing to obsess about.... My poor starving birds.

Thankfully, I'm not out of wine (that's for me- not the birds, by the way).