Do you enjoy watching the colorful Cardinals dance and squabble around your bird feeder? I know I do! Watching a daddy cardinal bustle around feeding his huge demanding baby reminds me of the goodness of fathers everywhere.
Eastern Bluebirds come through our pasture in late January each year telling me that winter won't last. One spring I watched as a family of five newly fledged bluebirds took turns flying in wobbly circles from their perch on our power line.
A Blue Jay family is loving our bird feeder this year. Back and forth from nest to feeder to nest again.
Owls fascinate me. Once when I was a very young child, my father and I spent an hour watching a Great Horned Owl surveying our yard from a low branch and calling his distinctive whooo-whooo-who-who-who. I sometimes hear that call at dusk and it always takes me back to that treasured memory.
Some mornings when I step outside my door I hear a familiar rat-a-tat-tat echoing through our little valley. I know the Downy, Hairy and Pileated woodpeckers are hard at work gathering their breakfast.
Late one summer, I was privileged to spend seven weeks in the company of a young Hummingbird who had been shoved from the nest because his parents knew he would never fly. I named him Baby. I carried him from flower to flower to add nectar to his diet and bathed him when his darting thread-like tongue could not do the job. I left him to wander my studio at will. He never learned to fly but liked to perch on one of my giraffes so he could watch my every move and chatter at me as I was making Little Guys. We woke to his insistent hunger cries each morning, and watched as, feather by feather, his throat developed the male's ruby color. When October's chill became too much for his constitution, we found him a home with a breeder. Sadly, he only lived a few more weeks. But Baby, the tiny hummingbird with a huge personality, has a permanent home in my heart.
The hummingbirds outside my studio inspire and delight me!
