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I got my folks a bird feeder a few years ago when they bought a new house. I grew up a few miles from there, remembering only sparrows, blackbirds, robins, etc and on rare occasions a yellow bird, or a brown bird, or red-wing blackbird. But with a bird feeder, it was amazing to see the number of unique birds that show up now every few minutes, birds of all colors that I didn't even know lived in the area.

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I was in a home improvement store and noticed that a sparrow had found its way to the aisle with the bird seed.

why does a home improvement store have bird seed/

Because these stores usually have a garden section, and bird feeders and bird seed are usually stocked in a garden section of a store. Presumably, the people who solve the optimization problem "given the amount of space available and the buying habits of our customers, how do we optimize our sales volume" have concluded that bird seed is one of the thousands of items they should stock.

Yes, and I thought it was interesting that the birds (or at least some of them) had solved the problem of "how do we optimize our bird seed consumption" by going to the source instead of a backyard bird feeder.

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