It’s empty again—the darn bird feeder my wife had me put up. I know I am going to get some hate mail about this, but just hear me out. There is a lesson here somewhere, and I just wish our government could find it.

It has been a frigid winter in Nashville. You know—global warming and all that! Anyway, my wife was feeling sorry for the birds. They must be starving, she said. Well they seemed to be getting along just fine as far as I could determine. I didn’t find any dead birds around the house. To give them the benefit of the doubt, maybe they had food insecurity. After all, I understand that 17% of the population in Tennessee suffer from food insecurity. So, I guess it could happen to birds.

I had never heard of food insecurity until last year. Contributions to local soup kitchens and charities that donate food to the poor apparently have been falling off in light of all the government programs designed to prevent hunger. Those programs include the the father of all food handouts—food stamps. So, the charities came up with the notion of food insecurity. The idea is that even if you aren’t starving, if you worry about food, you have food insecurity and that makes you obese. I’m trying, but to be honest, I still find that hard to swallow.

My wife might have had a second motive for getting me to purchase the bird feeder. She thought that since I spend so much time at my writing desk, it would be good for me to have something nice to watch from my writing desk. So, we installed a squirrel proof feeder on the small tree outside the window of my writing room. It took the birds half a day to find the feeder. Within I week, I was refilling the feeder every two days. By the second week, I was refilling the seed in the feeder EVERY SINGLE DAY! The more food I put out, the more birds came for the free food. By now my house was beginning to look like a scene in the famous Hitchcock movie The Birds. To take the pressure off the small tree I added a second feed nearby—they emptied it the first day. There is no end—birds, like people, just like free food. Give them free food and what they want next is more free food.

This is now serious. I AM OUT OF BIRD FOOD AND FRIGHTENED—I JUST HOPE I CAN MAKE IT TO SPRING…Please tell my family, I love them.

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For signed copies of books by Tom Collins, go to the TomCollinsAuthor.com. Unsigned print and eBook editions are available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online bookstores. For Amazon go to www.amazon.com/Tom-Collins. For an audio edition of The Claret Murders go to http://amzn.com/B00IV5ZJEI. eBook editions are also available through Apple iTunes’ iBook’s Store and Smashwords.com. For the new adventure novel on Amazon go to Diversion: a Mark Rollins Adventure.
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