That's a great photo of your baby crow, Marg. Sharon, butterfly looks like it is the Northern Pearl Crescent. Thanks. I googled some other photos and the colors were a bit brighter than on the Alberta Insect site. I think the ladybug is the Three-banded lady beetle, though. Check it out...there seems to be white outlines around his black markings. Thanks for that link. Here is a link that might be useful: Three-banded Lady beetle

SCG, maybe you don't have much snow cover where you are? If you do have good snow, cats shouldn't be an issue if you locate the feeder in an open area, hanging from a tree. Even the ground feeding birds will spot any cat long before it gets near and will fly up into the tree until the cat leaves. And in my experience cats don't like going out in the snow and cold anyway. Just remember to remove the feeder when the snow is gone and the weather warms.

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

I'm pretty sure this is a first year female RB Grosbeak. A family was born here this year. Just checked Cornell, and I think she should be on her way to South America. Doubt that she would listen to me, but does anyone still have any RBGs around? Of course, I could be wrong and maybe she's a hybrid Lowes/HD sparrow, but she's the only one of her kind here. Jane This post was edited by corunum on Thu, Oct 16, 14 at 17:25