Belated Greetings...

I hope you all had a nice Valentine's Day. This hummingbird was nice enough to pose several times last September on the heart shaped chimes so I just had to share him as my belated Valentine greeting.Thank you for all the wonderful comments on my last post. B is doing much better and is home from the hospital and Jeff & I managed to get away for a fun weekend. More on that in following posts. I wanted to share the Zick Dough recipe that Debbie & Linda asked about. I first heard about it on a post from Jayne at Journey Through Grace, but have since seen it on many nature blogs. I gather it is called Zick Dough because it orginated from Julie Zickfoose's blog.
The recipe is simple and can be doubled/tripled, etc. 1 cup peanut butter, 1 cup lard, 2 cups quick oats, 2 cups yellow cornmeal, 1 cup flour. Melt the peanut butter & lard together and then stir in the remaining ingredients. The hardest part of making this was finding lard in the grocery store :-) I roll some into logs for my log type feeders and the rest I leave in larger pieces which I then crumble and serve in tray feeders.
These are my log feeders.
I mentioned before that I take most of my shots through the window in the winter. Notice how most of the photos look like they are on the same branch? It's confession time..
I zip tie a dead branch on my wrought iron feeder pole about 7 feet from the window. As long as it is taller than the pole, the birds will always land on the branch first allowing me to capture more natural looking shots. Keep the windows clean, turn off the flash on the camera, keep the camera handy and while you're blogging or watching tv you can shoot away at whatever comes in to feed. I've done this for two years now after a wildlife photographer I met on another forum told me her secret.
Once winter is over I take this setup down and enjoy the beauty of the garden instead. I hope you still enjoy my photos knowing how easy it is for me to get them ;-)