Thanks for the alert. I'll have to put some jelly out. I like to see and hear them.

I am thrilled!! I mean super excited!! I just spotted my first pair of Baltimore orioles today!! My neighbor has has an oriole feeder out for several years but we've never spotted one. Now she is in a nursing home and hasn't had anything in her feeder and NOW they showed up. So I rushed around my house and found some thick copper wire, wrapped it around a small plastic cup, glued a yellow lid to the bottom and filled it with home made oriole sugar water mixture. Crossing my fingers that they come back! I'm going to make another feeder with hooks to stick on some orange wedges. These are such stunning birds. How I spotted them was I was cleaning our sons bedroom and saw them out the window on the tops of my dogwood tree jumping across the tops. They did this for several minutes. I then rushed down to my yard after they flew off to see if they were in my yard but no luck. I sure hope they return. Absolutely STUNNING birds!!

Thanks, Jane, for the references. I found the sites: Carl Strang's June 2009 entry and Stanford group essay on Cowbirds. I'm a little skeptical about Strang's statement on instinctual behavior - it may be true but it sounds more like a belief not based on any science. (Just a quibble on my part - if he'd said the juvenile cowbirds 'appear' to seek out other cowbirds, based on his observations, I wouldn't have been annoyed - but ascribing the behavior to 'instinct' is a jump too far). A very interesting fact in the Stanford essay is that only about 3 percent of cowbird eggs actually result in adults! That's major mortality. The cowbird female just keeps laying eggs and eggs and eggs ... "An average female lays about 80 eggs, 40 per year for two years. About 3 percent of those 80 eggs end up as adults -- an average of 2.4 adults per female. Clearly, such numbers more than compensate for the excessive loss of eggs and young in the nests of inappropriate hosts." I wonder how the current situation differs from the earlier situation when the cowbirds evolved to follow the bison herds and couldn't hang around to set up a proper nest without dropping behind and struggling to find food for themselves and the young. That behavior probably was dependent on the migration patterns of the bison, but nowadays the cowbirds have the luxury of being able to stay in the same area as their young, even if they don't get involved in the raising of them. As far as which came first, the parasitic behavior or the adaptation to it, I would think that the ability to lay so many eggs and the rapid maturation of the young would come early. There's an interesting entry in the Birds of North America Online site (subscription only) saying that "Most fledgling losses occurred 1 or 2 d after leaving nest". There are a lot of unknowns here, but it's an interesting topic for study. I'm glad I don't have to do the research myself, it would drive me crazy trying to pull together all of the variables. Claire

There's a Blue Jay in there too, at the very end. I'm not sure if that's an adult male or female Baltimore Oriole at the grape jelly. The females are really variable and sometimes similar to the males. It seems too early in the season for it to be an immature male. Maybe some of the more knowledgeable birders here will comment. I also wonder about the oriole in the gooseberries. Is that an adult female or a fledgling? Identification is so much easier when an adult male has the brilliant contrasting plumage with solid black. Claire