Oh, Sped, what a beautiful picture! She is special! You never know, we had Sara, a gray cat (with a red personality), for 22.5 years, so your pretty gal may have a few summers to go. Like us, you must run a good cat house, lol. PM2 - I WISH I lived near a conserved area. 'Fraid the closest we come is living near a right-wing Lutheran organist, but there are horses across and up the street. Fortunately, Ivy pretty much ignores the birds and has not killed one yet. She favors 4 legged things and the random slithering thing...yuck. Claire? Today I noticed a Blue Jay mimicking a Broad Winged Hawk. Darn thing got me to dash into the house for my camera thinking 'Oh, boy, BW hawk in flight" only to find this B Jay clearing out the bird feeder area with his mimicking. It is effective! Have you had a mimicking Blue Jay? The Broad Winged hawks fly overhead around noon time and shortly thereafter, this Blue Jay mimicks them. Jane

Love to see the turkey poults growing, Claire. Great pictures. I am sort of following two parallel threads showing young turkeys, yours and a facebook thread of the organic farm where we buy our thanksgiving turkey every year. Theirs are a heritage breed, very close to the wild turkeys, and out on grass, as turkeys are meant to be (not scrunched up into tiny pens and fed GM corn). Both sets of photos make me happy! I think your moth may be a promethea moth, Pixie. Also I love your photo of the running fawn. Jane, your beautiful pictures of the rose breasted grosbeaks made me recall the huge flocks of evening grosbeaks we had long ago during an era where we fed the birds. Since I haven't seen any photos of these beautiful yellow birds on any of the threads, I looked them up and am very sad to see that their populations are in decline now. Since we had the house painted last fall, we have had no swallows build a nest on our porch as in past years. Perhaps next year... However a pair of tree swallows have raised a large brood in the birdhouse out in my orange garden. You can hear the chorus of loud chirping as you walk by! Here's one of the parent birds ready to deliver a meal to the little ones. They spend all day, every day, collecting bugs to feed the babies. I expect the small ones will be taking flight shortly and the parents will finally have a well earned rest! It makes me so delighted to have beneficial birds nesting in the house once again now that I have prevailed in my campaign to rid the area of HOSPs (English sparrows). PankajT, nice photo of the red-bellied woodpecker. Seeing these birds in New England is one of the least objectionable effects of climate change, much more welcome than influx of ticks for instance!

Thanks everyone, We're always filled with anticipation as nesting season approaches, and we love to share our birds :) Kris- Yes we have hawks quite often here. We don't always see them, but we know when our birds do. So far we've been pretty lucky that they usually take a House Sparrow or Starlling rather than our beloved native songbirds. But we did lose one Titmouse to a Cooper last year. Not sure there's much to do about them... they are majestic creatures which share the habitat with all the other birds... and they must eat. We do always fear for our favorites of course, but we love the hawks too, and try to photograph them when we can. Here are a couple of shots of them... Cooper's Hawk: Redtail: Thanks again, and happy birding all. Kenn

Cool, so you know 3 are still out there!! I could spend all day watching the birds. We have had so many fledglings around lately...Orioles, Cardinals, Rose Breasted Grosbeaks, Chipping Sparrows, Downey Woodpeckers, Red Bellied Woodpeckers along with the not so desirable Red Wings and Grackles and of course our Blues and Dees. My seed and suet feeders (and jelly dishes) are on the opposite end of the deck from the mealworm feeder so our deck is a very busy place. I don't have an expensive camera either, I just have a old Canon S3IS which has a 12x zoom and then I have a 1.7x teleconverter added onto it to make it a longer zoom. I generally shoot in shutter priority mode so I can control the shutter speed so I can control how much light is let in. I would love love love a DSLR but I am pretty happy with what I have. I know I miss some good shots but I get some good ones too. It doesn't do very well in dim lighting though. Oh and I use photobucket to share my photos here. Upload them there and then use the html code and copy it here to share your photos. Go to photobucket.com to get started. Donna