for the (baby) birds

First an apology -- my camera is SO inadequate for this! But I've been wanting to blog about it for the past several weeks, and finally just decided to go with what I could manage to get for pictures (prepare to be entirely underwhelmed....).

For the first year, we have been feeding the birds straight through the seasons, and we are amazed at what we've been seeeing. Not only a wonderful variety of species, but over the last several weeks, we've had a parade of youngsters coming with their parents to be fed and learn to eat from the feeders on their own. In fact, one day last week there were so many baby birds of various species lined up on our railing waiting to be fed, a mamma Chickadee almost fed a baby House Sparrow by mistake! So I caught as many pictures of young birds as I could today to put some up here and share the fun. This young Black-capped Chickadee has decided she likes the Thistle Feeder, which seems a little odd since there's plenty of more Chickadee-friendly (at least according to the OTHER Chickadees!) foods available in our feeding spot.

Here's a general photo of our feeding spot -- on our deck we have strung up a feeder filled with sunflower chips, a feeder filled with niger (thistle) seed, and a suet feeder. Plus we cover the play table surface with nuts, dried fruits, and whole seeds, and a bit of millet for good measure. The idea was to attract the largest variety of birds that we could, and we seem to have hit on a really good combination. Having the feeders on our deck is ideal -- they are high enough to be protected from our barn cats and our dogs, we can watch the birds right out the sliding glass doors while we sit at the dining room table, and we don't have to worry about attracting bears. (A lot of fellow Connecticutites have had to take down their bird feeders because they were getting visitors of the large, hairy, scary type.)

I think a big part of the success of our feeders at attracting birds has been the fact that our deck is overhung by a really large Red Maple tree. In this photo alone there are dozens of birds, but they are pretty well hidden in the leaves (although in this picture you can see a young House Sparrow in the center bottom portion of the photo, see if you can find her). Which I think is the reason the birds all feel so comfortable bringing their young to the feeders -- plenty of readily available cover.

Today we were treated to a newly fledged family of Tufted Titmice. There were four babies, with their tufts fluffed out, chasing each other too and fro, begging food from their moms, and making an incredible racket given their small sizes. There's not much cuter than a baby Titmouse! It was a nice treat for us, and we needed one -- we had to cancel a camping trip at the last minute because J came down with a stomach bug. So having adorable babies to watch for most of the day was a welcome diversion for us all!

Here a young American Goldfinch helps itself to some niger seed.

Babies I wasn't able to get any photos of today (well, I got photos, they just were blurry little blobs!) included a couple of Downy Woodpeckers, a clunky young Hairy Woodpecker, a fluffy Cardinal, and a sleek young Chipping Sparrow. I was also hoping to get a picture of the gorgeous male Goldfinch, but he was being a camera shy daddy.

You can bet we plan on feeding the birds year-round from now on -- we didn't realize what we were missing before now!