The Visual and the Real....Mea Culpa

I have written in the past about how we tend to "favor" what we see over the other senses, and even sometimes over what is real and important.

An example: Cutting down all the trees in order to have a "view" of the lake, even if it hurts the lake itself. (I suspect that people often cut down all of the trees in front of their McMansions so that others on the lake can see them)

Here is an example to which I must plead guilty. The previous owner of left about 12 waist high stumps on the property. Other than being great places to set beer bottles, they weren't very pretty or functional for humans. We always intended to have them cut down.

But the truth is, one of the stumps was functional as a strategic lookout post for a pileated woodpecker before she would come to the suet feeder. To be fair to us, the woodpecker hadn't been back to the feeder for over 6 months. But it was one of those subtle examples of how, for nothing more than a nicer looking front lawn, we were willing to sacrifice part of the animal ecosystem.

And, yes, the property does look better with the stumps removed. Pictures will follow.