magpie visitor

Thanks for all the comments, everybody.

A beautiful magpie has been sitting on the gazebo roof right outside the window next to our computers during the daytime recently - every day, sometimes multiple times. It hurries away when it sees us looking at it, but it does come back and hang out there. (I wonder what it's doing though: I don't think there's food there unless it's eating apples from the tree. Seems out of character. They are omnivores though, I guess. Maybe there are a lot of slugs/snails in the hops?)

I want to encourage it to hang out and be less afraid, so I was plannning to gather some shiny presents and leave them on the gazebo roof for it. A quick websearch says leaving food for them is a bad idea because it can disrupt their regular feeding habits and the natural populations in the neighborhood and that they are mainly insectivores, and they are surely finding plenty of those already... oh no, and now another search says repeatedly that there's no evidence that corvids/magpies are attracted to shiny objects!

They use strings, wires, etc to line their nests, but these are surely built in the spring? And anecdotally they are known to steal small smooth stones...?

The Geranium Mafia

So, here's a funny thing about dealing with MIL's things. A couple of days ago Wax had to go to her summer cottage to bring her potted plants in before the freeze, and it took her like 5 trips with a wheelbarrow to carry all the plants into the cottage. This is a cottage that comes with two gardens and an orchard.

Well... MIL had what you might call a Geranium Problem. Wax says about fifteen 30ish ("Fifteen?! No, there's like 35 of them!") of the plants are geraniums. It seemed at times that she came back with another potted geranium every time she went out. There's literally not enough space in our house for all these potted plants.

Wax first tried to ask MIL's BFF if she could take them, since she also likes flowers and also has a little cottage. But the BFF looked a little shifty and said, more or less, 'Er... well, the thing is that I also have a lot of my own geraniums because, you see, we would go out together and... egg each other on to just buy one more geranium, see.'

They were reinforcing each other's darkest geranium-acquisition impulses!

Perhaps now that the vicious cycle is broken BFF will revert to a more human number of geraniums. Meanwhile BFF suggested in all earnestness that we can "find good homes for them," in such a manner that for a moment I was transported to an alternate universe where we were talking about puppies or kittens.

Wax is now thinking she's gonna have to leave the geraniums at the cottage over the winter, with the heat turned on minimum inside so they won't freeze, and drive over there to water them multiple times per week.