July Birds

This morning D asked me to take some pictures of the bird that has taken up residence in the new birdhouse in our front yard.  At first we thought it was a warbler as that word describes its song perfectly.  That little bird opens its mouth and out pours a liquid melody that shakes its whole body - such music!  However, after some research we discovered that it is a wren just not the Carolina wrens that have nested in our backyard in previous years and are more familiar with their characteristic up-tilted tails.

 

I managed to get some photographs, but they are not particularly good though possibly enough to help me track this little one down in our bird books.

 

 

The picture above shows the color more accurately than the one below in which the wren looks washed out.  I couldn't get too much closer because its quite skittish so I took these while standing inside the garage looking out.  It  knew I was there, though, and kept an eye on me.  If I tried to step forward, it flew off to a nearby bush, and I had to wait for it to come back. 

 

Some of you may have read of our attempts to keep the robins from nesting on our front porch this year as we are going to have the siding replaced.  We didn't want them to be scared off a clutch of eggs when the construction starts.  I didn't even buy any hanging plants to put out there as that has been one of its go-to places before.  When we noticed they were trying to build a nest over the front door light at the beginning of the season, we would go out on the porch and pull down any nesting material we found.  That had to be done four or five times a day!  Finally we were successful, and the birds found another place of their first nest.  We went off to Rochester for a while and came back to find - Voila, tenants!

 

 

What I hope you will notice is what I missed this morning and didn't see until I uploaded the bird pictures from today.  Do you see what is hanging down on the left side of the light?  I never realized robins were such great opportunists.  First, they waited until our backs were metaphorically turned, swooped in to snag a "their" light fixture, and then they snaffled some poor snake's shed skin!