RIVER CITY JOURNAL: WATCHING THE BIRDS MAY BE DULL AS POLITICS, BUT IT'S BETTER THAN TV

All the birds are confused. The owl is still here. Geese are flying north and south. And one mourning dove is showing off his IQ.

There are some pretty confused birds hanging around our backyard feeders these days, particularly the mourning doves.

I don't know a lot about doves, except they're pretty. And gentle too, except during mating season when the fellas chase each other a lot while the girls ignore them.

We have two bird feeders next to each other visible both from the kitchen window and through the patio doors in the family room. We sit at the breakfast counter every morning and watch the birds make there first assaults on the feeders as the sun comes up.

I can tell you for a fact that we get much better programming through our kitchen window -- which is just one channel, after all -- than we see on all those channels from the cable company.

The plot changes slower than a soap opera through our kitchen window. The subtle shifts in players, dialogue and staging rely mostly on changes in the seasons. This is a particularly busy time for the birds, what with nest building, mating rituals and, for some, migration.

Occasionally the birds are joined by our resident squirrels, the ones that have escaped the great horned owl high in the treetops. The owl is lingering longer than usual. Maybe he's like the rest of us who are still waiting for winter to arrive.

A big commotion at the bird feeders always lets us know that one or more of the cats from across the street is making a neighborly call on our feathered friends. Tabby fur, I can report with a great deal of accuracy, creates a frenzy among overfed birds.

One of our feeders is a finch feeder full of finch food that only finches like to eat. The purple finches are there every day all year. Some goldfinches whose feathers are still winter drab have been hanging around, probably trying to figure out if they should have gone south or whether it's time to go north.

Finches aren't the only birds mixed up by our weather. One evening I heard geese honking overhead. There were lots of geese going somewhere. I couldn't figure out where, and from the looks of it neither could they.

Several hundred geese in about a dozen big formations were honking on their way north. It gave me some confirmation that our weather isn't just a fluke. I rely on geese to know about the weather. They've been making weather calculations for hundreds of thousands of years, and I figure they've learned a thing or two.

Just about the time I started back into the house, here came several hundred more geese -- all going south.

It was fun. Fun for me. I don't know about the geese.

Next to the finch feeder is an all-purpose feeder that is designed to be squirrel proof. And it is. The perch in front of the feeder is a teeter-totter device whose weight limit can be adjusted to accept only little birds or to accommodate big birds too. Either way, the weight of a squirrel on the perch closes the feeder. One of the funniest things to watch is a young squirrel trying to figure out how to outsmart the feeder.

Last fall, I set the weight on the feeder's perch to allow bigger birds to eat. Most of the time, I'd just as soon the grackles and blue jays stay away. They mostly try to shove the feed out of the feeder and onto the ground. But with so many ground-feeding doves -- 20 or more at times, I thought during the winter it would be OK to have more of the bird feed scattered on the ground.

Sure enough, the grackles took to the new system right away, doing their job every morning by placing plenty of feed on the ground for every bird that wanted some.

A couple of weeks ago, we noticed one of the doves sitting on the limestone post next to the feeders. The dove was eying the feeder's perch, cocking his head every possible way. After a couple of days of calculations, the dove finally made an attempt to flutter onto the perch. It's hard, because a dove is so big and the perch is so close to the feeder. But, by golly, he figured it out -- became quite adept, actually. None of the other doves were even interested in being on the perch. But this dove started making quite a show of his new skill every morning. We laughed and laughed.

I wish we could laugh like that when we watch some of those sitcoms on TV.

Now that I'm convinced spring is really here and because I don't like grackles on the feeder, I've reset the perch to allow only small birds again.

You guessed it. It is taking that bold dove longer to unlearn his new skill than it did to get educated.

Well, that's the news from our kitchen window. I know it's not terribly exciting. Or informative. Or thought-provoking.

But look at it this way: There was no mayhem (the birds are getting a lot smarter than the cats), foul language (if those blue jays are saying what I think they're saying, at least they don't say it in plain English) or sex (that doesn't start for a couple of weeks yet).

Yup. It's a lot better than TV.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.