2020 has been a year of big changes for my husband and I. I won’t go into detail, as most of the changes aren’t really relevant to this blog. One change however, is. We moved. We still live in Northern New Jersey, and we are actually only one town over and about nine minutes up the road from our previous residence, but my whole bird feeding set-up has changed.

For starters, I have two feeding stations. During the course of moving I found my original feeder pole, which has definitely seen better days. Thanks to some very fat squirrels, it will never be straight again, but it still functions. So I have now set that pole up in our front yard, under a pair of trees. At the moment I am trying to keep it light, one suet and a small seed feeder. I have also relocated the felt birdhouse to the front yard, and plan to screw a wooden house onto the oak tree, just as soon as I find the time.

The backyard set-up is similar to my previous layout. I have my feeder pole with several feeders, including my finch feeder. Not far from the feeder is my birdbath. My two remaining bird houses, the gourd and the two family wooden house on a pole, have been relocated toward the edge of our property, as far from the house as possible, to make the birds comfortable.

So far, the feathered community seems to appreciate my humble contribution to their diets. The neighbors have an impressive bird feeder and house set-up themselves, so the birds are definitely familiar with the area. While I have not yet had time to sit outside and watch, I have noticed Blue Jays, House Finches, Goldfinches, House Sparrows, Starlings, Grackles (in droves), Robins, Nuthatch and a Red-Bellied Woodpecker. I also saw a House Wren briefly, while I was sitting on the front porch. There is also a large population of gray squirrels, although I haven’t caught any of them climbing up either pole yet, so maybe they are not as evolved as the monkey-squirrels that lived in our previous yard. And of course there are chipmunks.

Beyond the normal feeder customers, this new location seems to have a plethora of furry critters roaming about. As with our old neighborhood, there are plenty of bunnies. We have seen several deer, including a very new fawn, just relaxing under our neighbor’s outside table. We even saw a fox run across the street one evening.

Our closest encounters have been with raccoons. The first raccoon we saw wandered up on our deck like he owned the place. We were sitting out at the time, and I am not sure who was more surprised, him or us! After a minute, he recovered and ran across the deck at record speed, sneaking through the rails of the porch, very elegantly until the moment his butt got stuck. He struggled very ungracefully for a few minutes, tail in the air, before finally wiggling through. After all this, he hid under our deck for about fifteen minutes before resurfacing and sauntering back across the deck, right past us, as if it was the most normal thing to ever happen.

The second raccoon interaction involved our recycling can, one night. Three young raccoons had decided to tip over our recycling to find something tasty. When my husband investigated two ran off, but the third stayed happily inside the overturned can. Once he had joined his partners in crime, we cleaned up the mess and my husband when to see if they were still hanging around in our yard. In fact they had made themselves quite comfortable on our deck, so we went inside and watched them from the window. One was trying to get food out of a condiment packet, another was scratching his/her behind and the third was very interested in our grill, checking out every nook. Eventually they decided they were ready to move on and they headed deeper into our yard and over the fence.

All in all, our new home promises to provide a lot of new material for this blog and I look forward to sharing our new backyard adventures with you.