Speaking of birds

[conuly]

and I do know I've been speaking of birds a lot! - we have in front of the house some sort of evergreen tree. Nobody really likes it, we have no idea how to prune it so it's all shaggy in the worst way, and honestly I think we've all thought about getting rid of it... but the sparrows love that tree and have loved it as long as we've been here. You can hear them chattering up a storm all morning and into the afternoon, loud enough to wake the dead. And we also all like the birdsong, even if we're not such huge fans of the tree.

I just wish we knew how to get it into some sort of decent shape. It's not shaggy in a "ah, yes, it's a wild tree" way, it's just shaggy in a "wow, this is ugly" way.

Relatedly, if I wanted to put something under the feeder to make tidying the leftover spillage easier, what would I put there?

Comments

[dine]

I'm no arborist, but my first thought was maybe it's some sort of cedar; they can be shaggy and kinda ill-defined. I've no idea how to trim them - if it's just looks you may be stuck with it the way it is, unless you opt to remove it altogether.

how large is the spillage area under the feeder? because if the scattering is spread broadly, something like a small kiddy pool? you could cut a hole/groove so it could be centered under the feeder (if it's on a pole) or just put it underneath if it's suspended from a branch (I cannot remember what you may have said about placement)

[conuly]

I wouldn't be surprised if it *is* some sort of cedar.

And I'm actually not sure we could remove it without damaging the retaining wall. The hugely important retaining wall given that the foot of our property sits four feet above the sidewalk. So... even if I wanted to do that to the birds I'm not sure I could do that.

[low_delta]

I just move the feeder around. Too much waste (both from birds and seeds) in one area kills the grass. Some birds rely on spilled seeds for feeding, so I don't really want to clean up too much, but I wouldn't even know how, short of spreading plastic sheeting.

[conuly]

Oh, I'm not a fan of grass anyway. I remember too well the hassle it was when my mother decided to get rid of it all in favor of a garden. Don't want to do that again ever!

But there's no easy way to move the feeders around, they're on the tree.

[movingfinger]

What low_delta said... my mom's big feeder hanging over a cement patio was the easiest to clean up under, and the ground-foraging birds did well with that. It was much easier to get the moldy stuff up with a stiff broom than it is using any other tool under the feeder over the grass.

The plastic kiddie pool idea is interesting. You could punch a couple holes in the bottom for drainage and it would be scrape-able.

[conuly]

We do have a patio, I guess - but we can't see it easily from the window without leaning out. Where the feeders are now, on the crape myrtle, it's centrally located in the yard.

I wonder if I can get something nicer looking than a wading pool, which *is* starting to look like the direction of the best option.

[hudebnik]

In our neighborhood, "shaggy overgrown evergreen tree in somebody's yard" usually means arborvitae. And some of them are really overgrown, threatening the adjacent house. When we bought our house in 2001, there were two or three small arborvitae trees along the property line between our front yard and the next door neighbor's. (I say "two or three" because they merged into one another and it really wasn't clear how many trunks there were.) We didn't do much maintenance on them for fifteen years, as they got shaggier and more indistinguishable. Then in 2019 or 2020, shalmestere went out with some long-handled clippers to trim them, and she puts it, "the red mist descended"... anyway, we took them out completely, hired somebody to dig out the roots with a machine, and put a couple of lilacs in their place, with about five kinds of violets as ground cover.

Last year the next door neighbor planted "dwarf" arborvitae, which allegedly never grow taller than 5-6 feet, all around the perimeter of his back yard. We'll see how they turn out.

[conuly]

Well, ours isn't that bad, but the top of it is mixed in with the power lines. I just want it to be shaped a little?