Is It Spring Yet?

Is it spring yet? Last weekend, it sure looked like it was. It was relatively warm, warm enough for us to head outside for part of the day. It was nice to alleviate some of the cabin fever, but then two days later, we had a little bit of snow falling. It wasn't enough to stick or anything but, still, it was snow coming out of the sky!

Anyway, I got a couple of fun photos of our Saturday.



With the nicer weather, we switched out our neglected seed feeders for suet and got some visitors. Here's a poor photo of one of them. We had as many as 5 or 6 birds in the tree at once, and it only took them a few days to go through the suet. It was fun to watch. I'm wondering how soon we can get around to doing all of the science activities we've neglected due to a lack of birds over the winter. I mean, we put out the bird seed feeders, identical except for different kinds of seed to determine which the birds liked better only to have them hang, unvisited, until they sprouted and grew mold. Ooops! We also skipped the experiment to determine if colored mattered to birds (ie. identical feeders except for the color). We skipped making bird houses; we aren't sure where we could hang them anyway. Hopefully, we'll be able to get to some of these soon.

We tried to identify the birds visiting our tree. They are small, mostly black birds with a longish, thin yellow beak. I think they may be a kind of starling based on what I could find in our bird field guide, but my lack of any birding experience makes my identification iffy.


Here's Josh with an interesting combination of shorts, double-thick knit cap, and adult-size gardening gloves. It cracked me up!

Here are the boys "helping" with the pulling of weeds. The truth was I pulled, and they looked cute and got in the way. I don't think they pulled a single weed.


Scott on the porch with Madelynn.

And where was Mika, you ask? Flitting around here and there.