Birding...the all consuming pastime

Here we are starting June and birding continues to be a inescapable obsession for the girls on Our Side of the Mountain! No matter whether we are at home or away, a flash of wing, a whistle, song, or chip, or a silent percher all command our attention.

Our birding adventures have taken a new turn as we have begun to discover nests here, there and everywhere! We have already had a pair of Cardinals hatch 3 little ones in a bush next to our house. We couldn't believe how quickly they grow from the time they are born till they are fledglings and then they are gone! It was only about two weeks!

Cornflower last Friday discovered another Cardinal nest in the Marian grotto garden at our church and it has two tiny eggs which we now will have to obsessively check everytime we are at church.

This week we also discovered a nest in one of our hanging baskets on our front porch. First we discovered the nest without a clue as to what bird had made it (some little thief who had mangled all the coconut husk lining of my hanging basket!). A couple of days later, two white eggs speckled with brown appeared in the deep tunnel-like nest. The day after that, another egg and still we couldn't tell what species of bird was nesting there.

Then Cornflower's sister and dad decided to check the nest (OK it was at the Little Poppy's insistence as it would not even occur to Dad to look!) and Poppy says "There's a bird there" to which Dad who is not looking but merely holding up Little Poppy to look says "Yeah, OK, I know there are eggs there."

"No." insists Poppy, "There's a bird there. She looks angry." Finally Dad looks too and takes a startled step back as a dark eye gleams back at him from the tunnel nest. When Cornflower and I return home to Poppy and Dad's exciting news, we cannot resist the temptation to see for ourselves. To our disappointment, three eggs but no bird. Rats! We hoped the Mama Bird would return.

Then this past Sunday (Trinity Sunday), we came home from church and decided to check the nest and Mama Bird was home! We got a good enough look at her head and eye to identify her as a Carolina Wren and then we double checked our birding books to confirm the description of the bird itself and its eggs.

We also discovered this weekend that overnight some mystery bird had begun a truly ugly misshapen pendulous nest in our cherry tree with grasses and a long trailing.... nylon rope? No kidding. Of course the girls clamored for poor Dad to get the ladder and climb up to check if any eggs (or babies) were in it. Dad assured us that he wouldn't have been able to see an egg or anything else in the nest for the wad of wet wipe that was woven into the top of it. What a scavenger of a builder!!!

Five days later we are still no closer to finding the identity of the mystery builder who may have already abandoned this bizarre domicile. (My guess: the wife was outraged and a shrill "No child of mine is being born in this thing" made them look elsewhere to begin anew.) We will have to get a good picture of it to post.

Cornflower's birding compatriots, Caddie and Scarlett, were over on Sunday and they brought over an abandoned Carolina Wren nest that they had discovered in a plastic bag of all things on their back deck. It even had an egg in it (unhatched, of course).Cornflower added to their contribution a Chipping Sparrow nest that had been unused the last two years from one of the shrubs in our front yard. And to top things off, Cornflower and I asked our neighbor if we could have the abandoned Barn Swallow nest on her porch beam and she was most gracious to allow poor Dad to get out the ladder again and retrieve the nest. What a masterpiece it was upon close inspection! Tightly woven and reinforced with mud and stones and lined with several soft white feathers. Remarkable. So each of the three nests was placed carefully in its own special scientific abandoned birds' nest receptacle (read - handy empty shoeboxes) and the girls were set to the task of making identification cards for each box. Each card had to have the common name of the bird builder, his scientific name, the month and year the nest was found, city and state, and area specific location.

And to round out today, as we were enjoying a veritable flock of Red-winged Blackbirds at an area lake park, we spotted an unfamiliar bird who was eating insects/worms off the grassy clearning and was rather bold and brave considering the number of screaming, ball-kicking, light-saber wielding kids running all over the area.

Since I was the only one who got a really good look at it, I started to describe it as I drove to Cornflower who combed through our Birding in Georgia book which helps quickly identify birds by coding by color. Much like a game of 20 questions, Cornflower would ask questions about the bird I had seen as she went through the bird book and I would confirm or negate the possibilities (bead shape, coloring, tail pattern, etc.) and finally she said "It must to one of these three!" and handed me the book. The second one she had tabbed was it - the Eastern Kingbird. A new species for us! It is a thrill every single time we can identify a species we were unfamiliar with until then.

I don't know if the girls will keep up with their ornithology interests throughout their life, but I hope they will have fond memories of our pleasure now in birding as a family.