eating out of our hands

Boy I hate this, up at five and ready to start the day and no newspaper and no posting.  What am I to do while the coffee is going down?  Get your motor running and then there is no highway.

So why do I want the lunchtime birds to eat out of my hand?  I guess I like to think that that means they like me  What an odd thing.  Why would I care if they liked me?  Do I expect them to do me some favor someday?  I feed the finches because I like to have their song and dance on the railing, this kind of makes sense.  It's a little like buying a ticket to get into the theater.  People do that all the time and nobody wonders why they do that.  But then you see people, okay mostly children, trying to get animals to eat out of their hands and nobody gets out the butterfly net and takes them to the nuthouse.

Pigeons and squirrels they have been with us for centuries and yet they don't readily eat out of our hands. You would think that the ones that did, the ones who had fewer of the genes that make them afraid of people, would get more food and have more offspring than their aloof neighbors, and those offspring would be even less afraid of humans and get even more food and so on and so on until they were all tame..

But the consequences of that are not as good as I would think.  Who would want to leave their houses in the morning and be besieged by birds and squirrels begging for a handout, like beggars in some third world country?   Not pleasant.


5:30 still no newspaper.  I think I'll take my second cup of coffee out on the balcony.  If I am real quiet and still perhaps I will see a finch alight and walk down the railing to the flax sock.