Amish Wagon; Doug turning into The Bird Man (and fortunately, not of Alcatraz)

Just a couple more shots from our Saturday drive to Bergeson Gardens, in Fertile, MN, through Amish country. On the way, I also spotted this wagon--most likely a working wagon, and not just decorative lawn art!



And this sweet guy, whom all of you know as "Doug," is, before my very eyes, turning into a Bird Man! (I'll post photos later showing what he's done to our yard!)

It just seemed to me that he was working too hard, and needed to relax more. I remembered that one year, my mom thought the same thing about my dad, and told him that she wanted to learn macrame, but didn't understand it; would he read the directions, learn it and teach her? Being the sweet guy that he was, he did! And it seemed to be a relaxing thing for him.

So I tried it on Doug. I started talking birds (not those Evil Cedar Waxwings that would make him want to take up arms and defend the homeland), but sweet little songbirds and robin-types.

And he took to this in a big way!

Too big. Every day I come home, and there's another bird feeder. But then he went to war.

It seems that he's taken it as a personal affront that the squirrels are cleverly figuring out how to open the suet-feeder-thingy, that he's designated for ONE kind of bird. And he's definitely at war with the Grackles or Gackles or whatever those big Stephen King blackbird type things are that swoop about, thump there chests, and hog the birdbath. He thought he'd designate one area to be the blackbird area, and another for junkos and cardinals and finches and the "good" birds.



Now, whenever I can't find Doug, I just look out the window and he's out there with a stick chasing the grackles, or harassing the squirrels. And there are rules about whether to open our kitchen casement window because the right window scares away the grackles, but the left window scares away the sweetie-pies. But what is worse, and most disturbing, is that he doesn't want to let Bonnie out in the yard because she might bother the "good" birds. Ha! I say, Bonnie is the Queen, and she should get to go out, in the rare nice North Dakota weather whenever she feels like it! She trumps bird rights any day in my book!



Oh, and my sweet, kind, pacifist husband has even taken to uttering words like "BB gun." Anyone got any spare valium lying around?