Susan, I'm mostly seeing Sulphurs, which we have in great profusion here, and also a few Question Marks and Commas. I haven't seen any Red Admirals yet, but we had a billion of them last year so I'm sure I'll see some before too long. We have a small handful of native wildflowers blooming, and the orange tree was blooming for the last 2 or 3 weeks but it is finished now. We have had high temps in the upper 70s a couple of times lately, and all the little flying critters came out of the woodwork like crazy on those days. On the day we hit 78 degrees, red wasps were out. We have the most honey bees I've ever seen out and about in January, and I hope that is a sign that the honey bee population is healthy and abundant this year. Helen, If I forget and leave cat food on the porch after dark, we have a steady stream of visitors, including armadillos, possums and coons coming to eat it. I try to remember to bring in the food at night so we don't encourage these varmints to hang around close to the house. We just have too much wildlife here. Last night I stepped out onto the back porch to call the cat who had not yet come indoors for the night, and there were three deer standing about 15 or 20' from the porch. I think they were coming to the side yard to eat any bird seed that the birds had dropped from the bird feeder to the ground. All the wildlife here is so hungry and has a hard time finding food they like at this time of the year. We have a yard full of cottontail rabbits every night. I'm not sure if they're eating bird seed or maybe the winter rye grass. Dawn

We had one nest here in southern Indiana, first we had nesting, nested in a black walnut tree. now we have a mystery of a nest with a small bird that we have not got a real close look at, 3 eggs, blue with black swirls about 10 ft off the ground in a apple tree. The cedar waxwings travel in flocks except when they are nesting

A couple of years ago, I had a pair of waxwings nesting in a tree in my yard. A robin kept approaching the nest. Even though the robin didn't do anything to the eggs, the waxwings ended up abandoning the nest with the eggs in it because, I guess, of the robin coming too close to the nest and disturbing them. Even though robins don't pose a threat, I guess they felt the nest wasn't safe. I think the robin liked the location of the nest. Anyway, they stayed away for quite some time. They eventually returned and dismantled the nest and moved it to another yard. I had provided wool for them to build the nest so they didn't want to leave the wool behind so they relocated. I was sad to see them leave, but the next year they successfully nested and had 5 fledglings that all successfully left the nest.

I also never see the waxwings at my feeders, but they do appear when the winterberries are ripe, along with robins. The flocks will come and devour the berries and then go off to wherever they go next. Someone who posts on this forum, Konrad I think, has experience and wonderful pictures of cedar waxwings in Canada so he would have information for you. Claire