Hey everyone, thanks for all the help and suggestions :) I've checked with photobucket and I've only used 6% of the bandwidth. They did email me a few months ago to say I was at 80% of my usage...and that's when I took off a lot of pictures. Since then, they've increased their storage capability (even on free accounts). The only other thing I could think of is that I hadn't downloaded the new version of Adobe, which they recommend. I did that this morning, restarted the computer...and still no pictures :( For now, I'll just post links (which are working) and see if I can get more info from photobucket. Thank you all and I'll let you know when it's fixed.

A few weeks back I lost all my worms in my worm bin, which really stumped me because I had a flourishing and healthy worm bin that was thriving with hundreds of red wigglers in various stages of their lifecycle. I took a bit of a hiatus in feeding them as I was trying to maintain the level of mites I had in my bin (I basically wanted to keep it balanced). To be honest I don't know what might have happened, has anyone experience the same phenomenon? I don't think it was the mites as from most of the articles I have read they don't affect the worms and the population of them wasn't too out of control. Also when I looked through the bin to find any evidence of the worms there was still small amounts of food in the bin! Please help me on the famous worm disappearing act.

Where do you live? That's important to know. During summer the birds are molting and growing new feathers and may stay in hiding till they can easily fly. Some are staying with their babies fledging. And some have migrated. You also could have some raptors. Squirrels are rare this year by me. They come around when the tree nuts are ripe (acorns and hickory nuts.) You may be lucky enough to have some predators nearby that like to eat rodents (hawks, owls, coyotes, foxes, snakes, etc.) Wait till winter and see what returns to your feeders. There are a lot of seeds and insects out there now for them to eat. Around here we don't put out feeders till freeze because of bears who destroy them.

I’m so glad to read all the conversation about everone’s thoughts and experiences in each of your own neck of the woods. In the several weeks since my last post, I have slowly noticed changes around my feeders. We now have about a dozen bluebirds who are daily visitors. They began coming even before the recent arctic weather we’ve been experiencing here in the NE lately. Same for the woodpeckers - downy, hairy, and red bellied, and cardinals. Before the cold blast, we had more chickadees than we do now. We had less than a handful of goldfinches, but now their numbers are ever so slowly creeping up. Not too many nuthatches or titmice, but a few that frequent daily. A couple of squirrels have returned. Interestingly, my husband has a friend who feeds squirrels exclusively and his friend said the population of those that are regulars at his house nearly all but disappeared! Also, last week we heard about a gentleman in his 90’s in our town who has fed the birds for over 40 years! He experienced the same mass feeding frenzy near summer’s end that I did, then the complete drop off of any birds to be seen at all. He says he’s never experienced this in all his years of bird feeding that he recalls. We were going through nearly 2x’s the amount of seed than normal, to all of a sudden having seed sit out and basically spoil because it was hardly even touched for weeks on end. With the frigid temperatures, I have noticed an increase in the hawks eyeing our feeder birds. They have been unable to find food in the woods and areas they normally frequent due to a tremendous amount of snow and have, unfortunately, captured some of our unsuspecting feathered friends. They are quite bold, and hard to scare off, which is also unusual. And yes, we also have some feeder birds that seem unbothered by my presence at the feeders while filling them, and don’t fly away til I’m nearly on top of them! This year has certainly been a very interesting year in the local bird world!