Snow and Zick dough

This past weekend we got a little reminder that it's still winter in the form of cold temps and some light snow. When I woke up Sunday morning to see a nice coating of the white stuff, I thought to myself, "This is the perfect time to put out some Zick dough!" (Don't know what the heck I'm talkin' about? Click here to get more info and the recipe for homemade suet dough that Julie Zickefoose has so kindly shared with us all. It's crazy easy to make. If you haven't tried this yet and decide you want to, please heed her warning to not feed it in warm weather as it may cause gout.)

To my surprise, only a small number of the birds seemed interested in it. I've been offering it for a couple of weeks now, so I would have expected the birds to not be wary of it any more. But that's okay. My #1 customer was a White-breasted Nuthatch, and he was very glad to not really have to share it with anyone else.

His only other competition was a Dark-eyed Junco, who only had 1 bite that I saw...

And lady Downy, but she kept to the suet cage, while Mr. Nuthatch stuck with the railing.

He checks out the spread in front of him... notice that long trail of crumbles? It will diminish...

... piece by piece.

Snagging the last piece of "railing dough":

And now, dear readers, I have a confession to make: my heart's not been in the blogging thing for a little while now. I've decided I need to take a bit of a break. You can expect my posts to be a little more sporadic, and heavier on photos, lighter on words. I still have lots of photos I want to share, but text-heavy posts are getting to be a little more time-consuming than I can handle at present. I hope you'll hang in there with me.

And don't worry, I'll still post the answer to the latest Plume Zoom tomorrow. Sorry I created such a stumper this time around!