Busy Morning at the Feeders (Video)

Yesterday morning it was very cold -- low single digits above zero, F. -- and started snowing steadily. I've never seen such a sustained feeding frenzy at our bird feeders. There was a group of about nine pine siskins and at least six house finches that spent a lot of time vying for position at the tube feeder and the nearby thistleseed sock feeder.



Below is a shot of many of the same birds on the ground underneath the feeders. Apart from the occasional junco, I'm really not used to seeing flocks of birds on the ground in this location, and I'm not sure what sent them to the ground this time. I did see a large gray squirrel hanging from the tube feeder a day or so earlier (very unusual!), and perhaps it managed to knock a lot of seed out onto the ground. If there were mostly the usual empty shells (which we do clean up from time to time), I don't think such a number of birds would have spent so much time on the ground.