Thank you. :-)I was hoping you would see the post soon. We did manage to get them all back in the nest. I did not observe any mites while I had the chicks waiting for DH to take apart the house. I was checking for ant bites too. One lil fella probably wll die soon as his side seemed bloated...maybe from injuring something as he fell. The birdhouse is for bluebirds and does have a slope that the chicks may have wiggled up on and then out the hole. Mom and Dad starling were there within 5 minutes feeding them again. At least one of them was. The other parent seems to have a heck of a time getting in that hole(it was designed to keep them out)and just sort of stands around looking helpless. I just hate seeing fallen chicks and since I read on a bird rescue site that the parents will usually accept the baby even if you have touched them, I now return them to their nests. So far I have had good luck observing parents returning to nests that I have returned their babies to. If it looks like I may need to handfeed any at some point I will let you know so you can help me. Don't know if I would be able to as I do work full time though. I didn't realize dogfood would be eaten by the baby starlings. I had to give my pet bird handfeeding "formula" from a syringe. Do the starling babies just eat solid foods like that right away? ~Heidi

A Carolina Wren can eat from an upside down suet feeder. Some starlings can as well, it's not 100%, but nothing is. The caged suet feeders tend to block the red bellied woodpeckers, which is why I selected to use the upside down and feed a few starlings. It's only a few, not hordes, I can live with that. Maybe someone with more caged feeder experience can chime in about how effective they are. I'm pretty sure a Carolina wren could work it's way into your pantry and have at it if it took it in it's mind to do so. They get in everything.

We switched to feeding safflower, thistle and upside down suet feeders along with fruit, jelly and nectar, after our first year living in the country. We moved from the city to a rural area in Wisconsin and decided to put nest boxes out for bluebirds and wrens, our first year we had mostly HS but we also had one set of bluebirds and one set of tree swallows. Before the little ones had a chance to fledge the HS killed them and nested on top of them, we were sick over this. I removed all the nest boxes and started researching on how to keep the non-native and rough birds away. The switch to the foods we place out on our property was the biggest part of not attracting the non-natives and rougher birds. When the HS try to take over the nest boxes in the spring I shoot them, it is the best way to keep them out of the box, plus it gets rid of another non-native invasive bird. I tried removing their nests at first but they are persistent and do not give up until you get rid of them. We now get one or two nesting pair of bluebirds and usually four to five nesting pair of tree swallows and a pair of nesting wrens(all have fledged within the last week and a half) the few starlings that come in the yard to feed on bugs in the grass do not stick around long ( they get shot as well). This is not intended to offend any bird lovers ( we are bird lovers at our house ) it is only to tell how we deal with the invasive non-native birds that are taking over the territory of our native song birds.

I wish you luck, Booberry. There is lots of advice and tips already in this thread. In the beginning of 2009, DH and I decided to attack the extra pounds that had been creeping up on us over the years. We went into it with the idea that we weren't going to diet or count calories but basically change the way we ate for life. That meant three meals a day plus an evening teatime with the day's treat at about 8 P.M., not wasting calories on foods or drinks where there was a better alternative, and no snack foods brought into the house. The first couple of months, we also had Fat Friday, when we could eat anything we wanted or deferred eating until then. We tried to make healthier choices when we went out to eat and used the common sense accumulated over the years. We also didn't weigh ourselves until a month after we started. Without going into all the details, after a while it became easier and easier to find the happy medium between feeling deprived and feeling satisfied. Our tastebuds and minds seemed to have gotten retrained to a different idea of what constitutes "good food". My cooking style evolved and changed. Instead of trying to lighten up fattening recipes, I'd make something different with the ingredients or use different ingredients altogether. I have found some delicious, healthy recipes on the CF and made and enjoyed them but passed by others with lots of butter/cream/cheese I would have tried in the past. I still enjoy baking but either keep two nights' worth for teatime and give the rest away or bake for church, our neighborhood co-op or other organizations to satisfy that urge. We practice portion control both in purchasing food and preparing it. If I posted a photo of a plate of food on the What's for Dinner thread, that's the quantity we ate - nothing left in the pan unless I made a double amount of rice or something for a second meal. The main thing I've learned is that you have to find a weight loss plan that fits your lifestyle, your tastes and most importantly, your mindset because IMO, the brain has as much to do with dining as your mouth. We ended up losing a combined total of about 75 pounds (a drop of three pants sizes for me) in six months and I am happy to say that we have kept the weight off since then. We're now both in the middle of our doctors' weight charts and to go for a checkup and not be nervous about getting on the scale gives us more satisfaction than the two years' worth of pizzas we didn't eat. DH walks in a park near our house as soon as he gets up and I do about 15 - 20 minutes of exercise (cardio and stretching) along with a DVD five days a week but we don't belong to a gym. We didn't start that until about three months into the diet changes. The hardest part was deciding what to add back into our diet after we reached our goal weight but we eventually figured it out. No, make that the second hardest part. The hardest part was for us to stop talking about and researching ways to lose weight and actually start doing it.