eBirdseed.com Wild Bird Feeding Blog

Well, as the photo below shows, the sparrow couple seems to be settling in rather nicely. If you look carefully, you can see the female holding a slight twig in her beak. If all things go to plan, she should lay eggs in a week or so, and then incubate them for another week or two... With a little luck, we should hear chirping by early May... Time will tell.

(I really should go on a bird house building binge... Aside from the sparrows that now live in our existing bird house, chickadees and a woodpecker also expressed interest in the dwelling... But right now, the only thing Mrs. CapeCodAlan is going to let me build down in the shop is her cherry hutch... And she's right, I've got it more than halfway done - it's just that all of the challenging fun stuff is fini. But I can't build another boat until that hutch is finished so I guess I'd better snap to it.)

Not only is this the time of year for sparrow "domestic bliss", but it's also the season for the return of the humming bird. According to the Spring 2008 Migration of Ruby-throated Hummingbirds Map, it looks like the critters are just about to enter Cape Cod air space. Now that is cool. This Spring and Summer, I'm going to make a concerted effort to get some decent photos of the little birds. I know the workings of the NovaBird well enough now to hold my own. (The NovaBird is a remote, movement-triggered camera.) Unfortunately, the rig has a very slow shutter speed, (1/60th of a second) so there's no way we can get a good stop-action photo of the bird in flight. Necessity is the mother of... Awww, you know.

And speaking of the NovaBird... It looks like you can no longer buy direct from the importer. Still there are some folks selling the camera. (For what it's worth, the NovaBird seems to have been manufactured by SunPlus in Taiwan, and the model we're familiar with is actually an SPCA533.) On the other hand, the Wingscapes BirdCam looks interesting too...

Gotta run... See you by the feeders,

CapeCodAlan