It always seems to be,
I do not see what I set out to see,
but sometimes. . .
I see something better.
My parents have many birdhouses in their trees and often I get dad a new one for different holidays. So while we were visiting I had to check them out. They had at least one bluebird pair nesting.
Mom was surprised they even used the house that the “slumlord” (mom’s word) hadn’t repaired yet. You see they also have many squirrels and the squirrels do a lot of damage to the houses each year.
Do you recognize this curious little lady? While I had three males in my yard, I never saw a female. But here you have an Indigo Bunting.
And her lovely mate. Don’t you wish he would leave some of his lovely blue feathers behind so you could work them into some craft project?
Mom called a couple of weeks after we left to tell me that the pair had made a happy home in a nearby birdhouse. I wish I could go capture the babies - in photos of course. She called yesterday just to tell me that she had been sitting on her patio watching the 2 bunting babies feed at her feeder now. She says they are both blue like their daddy, so I guess they are boys too. Now I really want to drive back down to snap those babies!
Haden found a nest in an evergreen tree and we peeked (of course), mama flew out and we weren’t sure what she was. But the next day, we found her again.
Haden and I searched and searched for the bird that kept singing crazily (which happened to be the one from the nest the evening before). As Haden described it, this one bird seemed to make all the birds’ sounds. We were pretty puzzled by it.
She looked at me and I looked at her. I promised her a fat juicy worm if she would stay a little longer.
She serenaded me with her sweet lilting voice while I serenaded her with my clicks and my whirs (camera noises not alien ones). I had to refer to my bird book to figure out what kind of bird we had seen. And when I read, “. . .have the largest repertoire of songs of all the North American birds and are able to vocalize 3000 distinct songs.” I knew it was the correct one. The bird that kept me so enamored, as some of you probably already know, was the Brown Thrasher.
According to Whatbird.com, “Some brown thrashers are very good mimics and even sing songs of other species of birds as part of their own songs.” And while their range brings them into Wisconsin, I had to go to Missouri to find one.
