This is only my second year to have Orioles and I've never seen a nest. John - Do you know what kind of trees your neighbor has that they like? Last year, the Orioles stayed around for a little while and then disappeared so they must've nested in someone else's yard - not mine. This year they showed up about a week earlier than last year. I've seen as many as 4 males at a time in our dogwood tree where I've been feeding them. The females aren't around as much and I've only seen two. Here's a picture of my "Orange Tree" The darker one in the middle may be an Orchard Oriole. It was rainy. Here's a close-up of a Baltimore Oriole at the feeder.

I think you probably should separate the strands into random lengths and thicknesses. Then again, she may want to do that herself. At least loosen them. As for color, she sought out the yellow binder twine. I have a lot of yellow plastic binder twine leftover from when my farm was hayed. I just cut it and shredded off some relatively small strands and placed it back where she had been working on it. I haven't seen her since, but now I'm seeing lots of males. I'll be putting out my jelly jars tonight. I'm experimenting w/orange marmalade (because we have a lot of it left over) and the traditional grape. I've not had any come to the halved oranges at all. I understand catbirds also come to jelly. We have a few in our fencerow and thicker woods but have never drawn them into our more open feeding area. Hopefully, we can lure them in as well as I love all their unique calls.

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

Here's one I took. That's what I IDed it as. Yours and mine both look like immature females to me.