Thank you Tanja! I should correct myself, it's a Sony S600 Cybershot, the hack is the worst, best is to start on a cheap P32, or P43, I have ruined my first hack P32, buckshot does most of the hack video....below the 600hack. There are only about a handful of Sony's good for this hobby, there are some other brands but Sony's are preferred. Hunters use these allot for wildlife location, I always wanted to build something remote and stumbled onto this, I put them out simply to capture wildlife in my yard, it's a great hobby and very addicting! I'll give some more links later. This is the S600 inside of a 1060 Pelican case. The 3 mall batteries on top of he Bigfoot control board for power, the 2C batteries are for additional power for camera, so 5 wires get soldered inside the camera, 3 for running the board/camera, the other 2 wires for additional power. This is how the outside looks. Sony S600 on the left, the others are P32 and P43 inside a 1040 case. These can be strapped on the tree. Google Trail camera build. Here is a link that might be useful: Sony S600 hack

I have 3 nesting pairs of Bullocks orioles they were having a hard time eating from the hummingbird feeders so i drilled out the holes to a larger size. Then i found a oriole feeder at the thrift shop. Then i hung orange slices and put half oranges on a platform. then put a plastic lid about 1/2 inch deep on the platform and filled it with orange juice and pieces of fruit, watermelon, plums or cherrys and apricots now have evening grosbeaks and orioles all the time. Also this year after the young orioles started coming to eat have 11 small orioles here in and out every little bit from daylight to dark. go through 2 to 3 quarts of sugar water and 1 to 2 cups of fresh orange juice and lots of fruit every day. Here the Orioles disappear from late August to early Sept. and show back up in mid april to first part of May to nest.

Marian - That roadrunner would've been a great thing to get a video of. Happy ending but - I heard a thunk against my window this morning and went outside to find a male Baltimore Oriole sitting on the ground with his head tipped sideways and his beak hanging open. It took him 15 or 20 minutes to recover and he looked like he was getting worse for awhile instead of better. He kept closing his eyes. I couldn't resist letting him sit on my hand for awhile and I fed him some of the nectar from the Oriole feeder. They're so pretty. My kids have made home-made snowflakes and stuck them all over my bay window to keep the birds from flying into it since it's close to my bird feeders. I'm surprised he flew into it but he may have seen his reflection. Yesterday, he was landing on the ledge under the window and pecking against the glass. I wish I had another Oriole feeder. They seem to be territorial. It has four perches but I never seen more than one at a time at it. There were two male Orchard Orioles chattering at each other in the tree for a long time yesterday but neither of them would go to the feeder and the Baltimore Oriole won't go to it if there's already an Orchard Oriole there.

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