Dawn, believe it or not I do have peach colored ornaments. Nothing traditional for me. My peach tree is sterile so the only thing I have is web worms which have already started. I refuse to have the tree sprayed so I will take my little torch and have a web worm barbque. That is how my grandfather did it and he never lost his trees or burned anything he was not suppose to of course I was always on garden hose watch. I got where I would get my tomatoes just before ripe and put them in the kitchen and let them ripen indoors. The mockers were not eating them, just pecking like they were playing. The problem seems to be they figure out which are ornaments and which are tomatoes, according to some of the garden lore, so you have ornaments hanging and the tomatoes are stilled pecked up. The mockingbird goes back to the same area where they were born to raise their little ones, so you end up with mockers that are like family members. I have one that meets me each morning before I leave for work and flutters around while I do garden inspection. Then each evening he is back by the backdoor waiting on me. Guess I have a pet and dont know it. MH: I did not have any cardinals for years. I started putting song bird food out all through the year and now they make morning runs and evening runs to the feeder. Cardinals are very picky about where they eat. They are not big on the usual bird feeder but prefer the saucer type that is hanging from the trees or poles. I also put my feeders in the shade with quite a bit of shrubs and a large tree nearby, they feel better protected. I also have a shallow bird bath for all the birds. My father was a bird watcher and raised birds so I got a some data from osmosis from him. If you give them the right set up they will eventually show up, it may take a while, but it is worth it. I have had as many as 5 males at one time eating and fluttering around. Oh, I did notice, dont hang your hummer feeders close to your regular feeders. The hummers in my area seem to be very aggressive and run the other birds off, well, not the jays or the mockers, but they are really not your usual bird. Oh, yeah, bird feed they seem to like: small oil sunflower seeds or the song bird mix you get at the old wally world seems to be the diet of choice. Well, that was probably more than you wanted to know, but I got on a roll and Dawn and Susan can tell ya sometimes I do go on. Happy gardening and bird watching. Steffie

Randy, Three batches of baby birds! Cool! Oddly, we haven't had any phoebes this year at all, which is not surprising, I guess, in a year when EVERYTHING has been odd. The rest of the bird population seems fairly normal, although we have more hummingbirds than usual and fewer bluebirds. We have had rufous hummingbirds in addition to the usual ruby-throated ones too. We often see rufous (and black-chinned hummers) during the migration only, but this year, the rufous have stuck around. Like you, we have a huge wasp population as well as tons of ants AND grasshoppers. I think this is the worst grasshopper year in 6 or 8 years. What's missing? No Colorado Potato Beetles (not that I'm complaining), no aphids, and spider mites only on the verbena bonariensis. TONS of brown stinkbugs and green stinkbugs, and they arrived in May instead of July. They're obviously my biggest garden problem. We're raising 17 keats (baby guineas) bought at the feed store to go with our three surviving males from our original batch of 24 almost a decade ago. Since keats generally don't hatch until late May or early June, these are still really small and we had to chase a 7' long snake out of the henhouse last night. Most years we lose all our keats to the darned snakes and I am determined not to let that happen this year. That's the bird and bug report here. Dawn

My sister just called me with a similar problem with the phoebe nest on her deck. The first thing that came to my mind was the cowbird. I'm surprised that no one has mentioned this notorious brood parasite. Even though the cowbirds most common host is the yellow warbler, the brown-headed cowbird often targets Eastern phoebes for its host. I've actually seen female cowbirds egg-dump phoebe nests. It's an extremely fast process. Now before people have evil thoughts towards the brown-headed cowbird, I have to say this: it's not the cowbirds fault... Cowbirds evolved following roaming buffalo herds around, and therefore developed a breeding strategy (brood parasitism) that allowed them to do so. The cowbird used to be an uncommon species here in the northeast, but during the 17 and 1800s almost all forests were cut down for farmland. Since cowbirds are an open spaces/prairie species, this is the perfect habitat for them. They also like edge habitat (powerlines, forest edges etc.) So, I told my sister to keep watching the nest for a cowbird chick. The young, a week or two along, should be larger, louder and healthier by far than the others. It's more agressive behavior as a nestling makes it sure that it gets fed at the expense (often fatal) of the others. So if the young in a nest all look and sound the same, chances are it "cowbird-free."

This will be my last foster because I do get too attached. Buster isn't adopted yet as far as I know and is probably at Petsmart. When I checked on him last night at Superpetz, he was in a large crate in a quiet room in a snuggli sleeping. He had water, food, and litter. These were never feral kittens but were about two weeks away from becoming. Their mother had two kittens in the spring and son says these are identical to them except they are grown now and feral..Mother is semi feral and I took the kittens at four weeks. I've kept Henry in the powder room because I wasn't here today in the afternoon because of grandson's soccer tournament, but tomorrow I will open the door and let him wander around. I read at 14 weeks siblings start to get rough w/ each other and don't have the dependency they once had. These two were sometimes sleeping separately. I couldn't handle two kittens and in a week he'll forget he even had a brother. Besides he inherits six bossy "sisters" and an elderly brother who could care less.