Sunday, April 24, 2011

The Sheerest Outrage

This past Saturday I had cause to wander into a section of our local grocers' that I never usually frequent. And adjacent to it is the "bird feed" section. What I saw drove me into great annoyance. Here were bag after bag of lousy, worthless seed... the light-colored ones almost entirely millet and milo. Pure junk--unless you like Starlings, I suppose. Oh, and a little bit (<5%) of sunflower seed, but the inferior white striped kind. The darker bags: generally all white striped sunflower, but a good share of filler, too. The "attraction" charts on the side made claims the stuff would most appeal, (using the example of millet) to -- get this -- House Sparrows (who wants them???) and White Throated and Song Sparrows which almost always avoid feeders. They didn't even try to sell the milo. At the bottom of the day, this is a terrible place to buy bird seed. The stuff is vastly inferior to black oil sunflower seed which always brings them in. How many people buy this stuff thinking they're doing any bird a favor? Quite upsetting...

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