Food of Wild Birds

How far is Healthy? I am not writing a song, but I do have a bit of a philosophical question. [Please send scientific theories and data as well!] When you are fat and happy, why change a thing? If you don't look around and learn something from other people's problems then you are doomed to experience many of the same problems that you might have avoided. But is unhappiness required for motivation? No thanks. I don't need the pain. I will be perfectly happy trying to maintain that delicate balance of fat, enjoying the process and realizing that happiness is part of being healthy.

So what we have today is plenty of food, right? But what we could stand more of is knowledge of the sources of our food and nutrition; and possibly a little more of the quality food and less of the junk.

On our farm, it is not true that the animals were not named who were to be with us the shortest time. The cause and effect relationship was more likely to be the other way around (thus the double negative, sorry). The truth of the matter is that the animals that were named first were the ones who required the most attention, and if we adhered to good efficient and sustainable agricultural practices, often those needing too much attention were the first to go. As in if we are going to feed them every day, we like to see them domesticated. (I heard a banker say that recently.) We go to the woods for that taste of venison, and we eat our marbleized beef roasts when we have a taste for fat.

I also love the birds. When I hear some of their calls, they are not so much sounds as places and times in my mind.

Someone said that the reason that you get sleepy and lazy after a big turkey diner is something called triptophan that you get from the turkey meat. I am quite sure that with me, it is more a function of the quantity of turkey eaten, who made the dressing, and how close to the fireplace I was sitting. But it is also true that Turkeys are easier because it takes fewer than other birds to feed the family. And it is fairly easy to determine what a wild turkey has had in it's diet when you know the local farmers. Basically, even the Wild Turkeys have had pretty cushy lives in the Americas most places for several centuries. And the triptophan is the evolutionary hold-over from when there were more cats here that were big enough to eat us! But if you want to go all natural, turkey is good to eat.

I like Pheasant too. I wouldn't try to say that this is 'All natural' here in America, but you can find these birds in slightly wet and less cultivated areas of the uplands so that the feeding range of some may be away from the GMO and chemically treated crops. So the birds are essentially "put" but their feed less so. Some of the other birds and fowl that you find in the same areas range too widely for this.

So the subject is Wild Bird Food. If this is still something that your neighbor puts in a feeder hanging outside their window and then spends hours trying to figure out how to keep the squirrels from getting to it, then you just keep eating just the way you are.