I love our yard. It is very small, but often very full of activity. This year we have new visitors to our yard. I know that we have had one once or twice, that I have seen, in the past. But this year they are regular visitors. They might have been regular visitors for some years now, but they are very shy so perhaps we just didn’t see them before. I’ve only seen them twice in years past, as I said. Since they are shy I don’t have any good pictures of them. The second we approach any window they are gone. But our hummingbirds are very brave this year. I can walk right up to the window where the feeder hangs about six inches away and the birds will just sit there. They seem fearless. And we have one that is the largest one I have ever seen visit our yard. This past week we had a little bit of rain. First it started off here as a mist, then the drops came, but it was a very gentle rain. Oh my, you should have heard and seen the yard. There were so many birds it in. They seemed so happy. They were just jumping around from place to place. It was a nice sight to see. I love that we have so much entertainment in our yard.
The new visitors are orioles. There seems to be at least four. There are two brightly colored ones and to “dingy” ones. They barely look yellow. One of the dingy ones has a bad leg. I say that because as she perches on anything there is something that hangs down. And she doesn’t perch well. She rocks on the feeders unless she is situated just right. When she is on one of our towers she hunkers down on it.
At first they knocked the yellow flower out of the hummingbird feeder. But once we saw them feeding on the hummingbird feeders we removed a flower from each feeder.
I think the new birds might be affecting our hummingbird population in regards to how many we get visiting the feeders in our yard. But that is ok. They need to eat too.
This is why I recently posted Outside Yoga – Easier Said Than Done because we have so much bird activity. I get distracted. Birds are fascinating. The blue jays rarely just pick a nut. They will land and pick up a nut, then put it down. Then pick up another nut, then put it down. It looks sometimes as if they are shaking it, but I am not sure. Then they will pick up another one and put it down. I’ve seen one bird do that a dozen times. I am so curious as to why. I have my ideas as to why, but I would love so much for them to be able to tell me.
The collage with the orioles makes me squint because of the out of focus, faded pictures where the oriole has his back to the camera. They are that way because I was taking it far from a way and through a dirty window and through a screen. The orioles are very skittish. The blurry photo where his coloring is bright was from very far away and as soon as he noticed me he was gone. The one of the oriole in the tree, that is the less-than-brightly-colored female.
The mourning dove has been trying to get to that feeder for days now. And I say “trying to get” because I have never seen it IN the feeder. It flies up to the top of it and that is as far as we have seen it get. But perhaps when we are not looking it actually makes it to the bottom to get the seed. Tonight my husband and I watched its progress. The mourning doves are skittish, too, but I think her having won such a hard battle she was not going to just fly away.
Our yard is small, but we are blessed with visiting birds. What’s in your yard? Do you have a flower garden? Do you have a vegetable garden? Do you have birds that visit?
Terre Pruitt's Blog 