Watching Birds

My Grammy (as opposed to Fiona's Grammy) gave us a nice bird feeder for Christmas with a bag of birdseed.  This was a really cool gift for us because we have a window seat with large picture windows looking out of the north and west sides of our house, and everyone loves to watch the world go by.  Sammy's favorite perch is on the wide sill of the windows there, and the kids climb up every morning to wave goodbye or welcome home their Daddy.  Even Cocoa likes to sneak up and check things out every so often.

When the hubbub of Christmas was over, we hung our new feeder, plus a suet feeder that was in the kids' stockings, in front of the windows, and it didn't take long before we had new visitors.  We've been watching the birds and squirrels play, and this week I realized I don't really know a lot of the visitors we have.  I mean, I can tell a blue jay from a cardinal from a robin, but that's about as far as I go (unless you get into domesticated poultry :).  

Our new favorite website this week is the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's All About Birds.org  There's a lot of neat info on identifying different species, and you can even listen to the songs they make, and get pointers on telling them apart from look alike species.  

Elijah, who is fascinated with all things flying, loves to alert us when birds have arrived at the feeders by yelling out, "Caw, caw!  Fwy, sky!"  A toddler version of "Squirrel!" also tops his vocabulary this week.  Fiona tends to lunge at the birds, wanting to be even closer, while Sammy stealthily stalks them, but hasn't yet figured out how to get to them.  Cocoa keeps checking out the dog door for the squirrels, but not finding them.  The winter blues definitely have less of a hold this year =)