nesting know-how

Since we've been having such great bird activity here, I thought I'd treat our visitors to a spring treat: nesting materials. The great thing about a project like this is that it takes next to no time, plus it's free. Just gather a few spare household and garden items and secure them outside for your feathered friends to discover (read more details here). Our neighborhood birds have their choice of cotton yarn and some dried-up strawflowers from last year's containers -- I cut both into 4- to 8-inch pieces. Then, I piled it all in a clean wire suet feeder and hung it on the balcony. So easy.

Come and get it, birdies!

baby, it's cold outside

All is well here in our little corner of the world. I'm about ready for bed (my new job -- which I love! -- requires me to wake up hours earlier than I had when I was freelancing full time), but wanted to share this photo with you. It's our "winter garden," complete with two bird feeders -- their patrons spend as much time playing and fighting among the branches as they do eating. You may say it's a clever way to distract people from them (the apartment rules on them are quite ambiguous).

I'm pretty proud of the planter, which contains an armful of broken boughs donated to my cause by a woman at a tree lot, plus some red dogwood and variegated boxwood branches. Can you think of anything else I can add to it? I'm considering it a work in progress.

a profusion of color

If I haven't mentioned it, I've been hard at work on an article for Birds & Blooms magazine, which has kept birds top-of-mind for the last few weeks, and I seem to be noticing them more than ever. In the past 24 hours alone, I've spotted four new spring arrivals.

Yesterday afternoon, while I was sitting here at my desk, a red streak shot across my window. At first, I thought it was a cardinal (there are many in our neighborhood), but then I saw it perched in a nearby locust tree. It definitely wasn't a cardinal -- much too vivid. Ian suggested that it may be an escaped parrot. It turned out to be a male scarlet tanager. (His lady friend was here too, but she's almost exactly the same color as the leaves, so I couldn't find her in my photos.) The birds stayed for more than an hour, so I'm obsessively watching for them today. No luck yet.

And if that first-ever sighting wasn't enough, this morning, the first creature I saw outside was a male rose-breasted grosbeak, one of my all-time favorite birds because of its comic-book coloring. Soon after, a Baltimore oriole appeared at the little thimble of grape jelly John keeps outside for that very reason.

All this observing has led me to discover mystery birds that look quite a bit like Townsend's warblers, but if that's what they really are, they're about 1,000 miles off-course. Is anybody able to venture a guess?