We rent a home that has an awning over the back door. Since before we have lived here, there has been a bird's nest under the awning. Year after year, either the same birds, or generations of the same birds, or at least birds that look very similar to each other, have used the nest. (I'm not an ornithologist or a birder, so to me, these are LBBs: little brown birds. Some kind of house finch, I'm guessing, but what do I know?). We have had the joy of watching two sets of loud, chirpy baby birds learn to fly outside our back door.
You may have heard about the mild winter we have been having in the DC area. Honestly, it has seemed more like a long fall and an early spring than a real winter - we have had very few storms and barely any snow. The crocuses have even begun blooming in early-to-mid February.
Well, today we had another sign of a mild winter: our LBBs are back already - a month ahead of last year. Daddy and Mommy Bird spent the day working on the nest. Now, we have no real idea which of these birds is Daddy and which is Mommy. We noted than one of them was much slimmer and the other much fluffier and more rotund, and GG and I hypothesized that might mean the fluffy round one is Mommy Bird getting ready to lay some eggs, but what do we know?
Daddy and Mommy Bird also brought us a bonus: another pair of birds appears to be setting up a home at the other end of our awning. Maybe we will get to watch two sets of Baby Birds learning to eat, cheep, and fly just outside our door.
(Edited to replace 'LGG' in the original version with 'GG' in this one. As she reminded me, "Daddy, I thought we got rid of the 'L' a while ago...")
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Fun,isn't it? Out here in sunny CA, we have a similar situation with Purple Martins that return to a nest under the overhand of our front porch...for four or five years we've watched babies emerge and learn to fly...only problem is an abundance of bird poop that requires washing down with the hose every other day or so...
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