Goldfinches! Hummingbirds!

I’ve been continuing my feeding of the birds by putting out safflower seed daily.  This has caused the grackles and starlings to leave our yard, since they don’t like the safflower.  Doves are also not supposed to like it, but our homegrown flock of the fighting pinheads have learned how to snarf it down; oh well.  We mainly have house finches, cardinals, chickadees and titmice, and sparrows of course.  We also have some Carolina wrens, and our two catbirds are back, although I don’t ever see them eating seed. 

In our front yard we have finches in one birdhouse and a tiny bird in the other, which I have finally identified as a house wren.  The two alleged house wrens are really teeny-tiny—much smaller than the finches and very slender, not rounded like a chickadee.  They also are not very shy and will fly in and out of the house and alight on nearby branches when we are out gardening in the front yard.

We put up our hummingbird feeder a month ago but hadn’t seen any there until recently.  I’ve seen a female a few times now—a small brown hummingbird getting nectar from the feeder.

Owen likes to come out with me in the morning and add birdseed to the feeder.  He will look up in the sky and say, “Birds! Time to eat!” (which is really more like, Bur! Ime Eat!).  And he will help me put seed in the feeder, although it is sometimes hard to get him to go back inside when the mosquitoes find us.