The art of attracting migratory songbirds is one that I have never participated in.  However, the same cannot be said for my mom.  I have to admit that I do enjoy the occasional oriole sighting, as they are only around for about a week each Spring.  After spotting a pair of orioles in our yard, my mom cut up some oranges and put them outside on our deck.

The effectiveness of attracting the orioles was apparent within 10 minutes of placing them outside.  At one moment, there were five orioles pecking the oranges at the same time.  It made us all wonder who decided to feed oranges to orioles, or how orioles discovered freshly sliced oranges.  Of course this is not what I want to focus on for this particular post.  It’s too much of a which came first question, and the jury is still out on the chicken vs. the egg.

Back to the orioles.  They enjoyed the oranges so much that the fruit slices were quickly picked clean and thrown from the deck by the ungrateful birds.  Much to my mother’s disappointment, we were officially fresh out of oranges.  However, we did have some grapefruits that were at risk of getting old.  They also looked surprisingly similar to their brighter orange counterparts.  Perhaps making a grapefruit offering to the birds would please them?!

The sliced grapefruit was put on the deck, and the orioles returned.  However, they would taste one slice of the fruit and quickly move onto the next slice until they had tasted each slice (this was very amusing to watch).  The look of disgust was apparent on their snobby bird faces.  How dare we poison them with this bitter fruit.  They left in protest, not to be seen again.  As far as I’m concerned, they might as well not come back as they’re certainly not welcome here.  Far too ungrateful a fowl for my taste.  No harm no [fowl]…  I know… orioles aren’t fowls, but it just worked so nicely