Our birds are gone!  It is not just that they are not coming to the feeders.  There are almost no birds in the yard at all and we have a lot of the kind of landscaping that provides food and shelter.   We have had a good amount of birds here for the past 30 years at this time of the year. We feed sunflower chips in our hanging feeders and the feeders usually have a constant stream of birds all year long.  Neither of us can remember another time when the majority of the birds have just disappeared. We always have goldfinches, chickadees, jays, sparrows, doves, cardinals and woodpeckers as well as the more transient birds that come and go seasonally.  The yard is noticeably quiet.  I saw a pair of finches this morning.  We usually have 40 or 50. This started at least 10 days to two weeks ago - maybe a bit longer.   We have had about a dozen grey squirrels for the past year or so.  Suddenly we have just one.  We were worried there is something wrong with the seeds we are feeding but it seems much more widespread a problem from the reports coming in all over the Upper Valley.  We were wondering if Jose spinning off the coast of Massachusetts might have triggered some flight instinct that a storm was coming.

Lynette C.  in Springfield, Vt.


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