It's In the Bag

It was necessary last week to retire several nyjer seed bags (the strings had finally deteriorated.) In most respects this would be a simple replacement: that is, the American Goldfinches would use the new product hung in place of the old. But these are birds, after all, and there is no predicting what they will do. And what they did do for four days was to ignore the new, clean, albeit longer sock (I bought a two-footer!) and strictly use the surviving old, discolored, nasty bag six inches away. Eventually one reasonably curious finch tried the new feeder out and eventually it started getting as much traffic as the old. I am even speculating that the Goldfinches weren't the pioneer here: photo evidence suggests that the House Finches were likely the first to take nyjer seed from the new bag. Happily, we are back on course, and the new sock is used, and I am attracting a fair number of Goldfinches (which I did not do through most of 2008-09.) Another small success for the new year!