HC, "I'm curious as to what 'Highlights' actually is. I can't find that stated in the literature. I think commercial zinnia breeders know scads that they are not making public." I agree. Burpee is owned by Ball, who sell the yellow Zahara, but if you compare the shorter rounder petals of Yellow Zahara with the somewhat longer, narrower petals of Burpee's Highlight Hybrid, it appears very probable that the two are different zinnia cultivars. And Burpee claims Highlight Hybrid as an exclusive, so I think it probably is. I do tend to doubt that Highlight Hybrid is actually an F1 hybrid, however. The Marylandicas are of hybrid origin, but because of chromosome doubling, they are actually open pollinated and, in my opinion, it is mislabeling to refer to them as F1 hybrids. You could cross two Marylandicas to produce a legitimate F1 hybrid Marylandica, but I doubt that has been done in any commercially available zinnia. The Zahara Starlight Rose that JG linked to looks like a likely starting point for a race of bicolor Marylandicas. I have yet to see a Marylandica that really "turns me on", but that one comes close. Crossing Zahara Starlight Rose and Burpee's Highlight Hybrid could produce some interesting results, particularly in the F2 generation. Incidentally, it should be possible to start with a Scabiosa x Angustifolia cross and produce scabiosa flowered Marylandicas. I think that might actually happen commercially in the future. Thanks for the compliment on my photos. I enjoy photographing zinnias almost as much as raising them. Next year I hope to get a digital SLR for much better control of my picture making. I always have trouble controlling focus and depth of field and my outdoors pictures usually have a problem with wind moving the flowers around while I am trying to take their picture. I hope to figure out how to make a "garden friendly" portable windscreen to help with that. I rarely make a zinnia picture that I am entirely satisfied with, but that also holds true for my zinnias themselves, so I just enjoy the quest. I have to say that your cell phone pictures are amazingly good, considering that they are from a phone. It would be hard to hold you back if you had an actual camera. But your phone pictures are a big help and much better than a simple verbal description. As they say, "A picture is worth a thousand words." That holds true even for phone pictures. Keep those phone pictures coming. ZM

I can't tell if anyone here's from Colorado. I had my only sighting a week and a half ago, either rubythroat (unlikely) or broadtail (more likely). They head to the mountains. In the west suburbs of Denver blackchinned hummers usually hang around, but I get the migrants too. Not so far tho. Nothing and I mean NOTHING! Two feeders out, brilliant red begonias, and my nice red lounge chair LOL!

Well somebody's been extremely busy! I now have a nest on the outside light! Just a few pieces of what looked like straw yesterday, today a full nest. I am a little surprised that they went ahead and made the nest there, hopefully I can get some pictures when I get eggs! If I'm lucky, I can get pictures of the birds and you guys can positively ID them for me! I'm excited...lol... Fairy, I've heard robins use the same nest year after year if not removed. Did they come back? Oh and hey dirtgirl...put your link down here where you reply in the spot where it says Optional Link URL: then just give it whatever name you'd like below. Easy. Terry Here is a link that might be useful: dirtgirls fav bird link

Normally House Finches winter over in this area but for reasons known only to the birds, they all disappeared in early December and are just now starting to return. According to the state Audubon Society Purple Finches winter here but they are cyclical. About once every decade we see an over abundance of them, but generally they are rare and in some years totally absent. I went back and did some additional research on the House Finch. It appears that they are really a non-native species that were originally kept as cage birds. A small number of them were accidentally released on Long Island,N.Y. in 1940 and they first appeared here in Ohio in 1964. By 1980 they had spread across the entire state of Ohio and have established a very successful breeding ground here. What I found most interesting in my research is the fact that the railroads are attributed with the wide spread of both House Finches and the European House Sparrow. Both species were initially released in the New York area. Having been introduced into an urban habitat they were initially unfamiliar with the local flora and fauna, and therefore relied heavily upon man made food sources. It is believed that many initially found the most abundant sources of food near warehouses or food processing plants where grain or other foodstuffs gets spilled from railroad cars during the loading and unloading process. Some of the birds were inadvertently closed up in the railroad cars when the doors were closed and they were transported to distant cities before the cars were opened again. This accounts for why their is an abundance of these birds in urban areas while they are often considered rare in rural areas.