New Month - New Nests

Today is a new month, April the 1st.  However, with the current world wide pandemic and forced isolation, April Fools Jokes are probably the last thing on anyones mind. Instead, we have found ourselves these days being  more focused on connecting with friends via telephone and concerned about each others good health.

I am getting a lot of positive feed-back from people that read this blog, which encourages me to post even more.  I just glanced at this past month, and in the month of March,  I posted 12 times.  Which is a big up-tic from what has dropped down to only posting 3 or 4 times a month.  In fact 12 is the highest number of posts in a month since December of 2017. I guess, staying home has given me the time and opportunity to be a little more observant of the things around me, like birds for instance.

Birding every day makes it easy to notice any change in birds and their behavior.  Two days ago I wrote about the singing males that caught our attention, White-crowned Sparrows and Dark-eyed Juncos, and for the past two days House Finches have been singing. Yesterday what caught our attention was new nesting activity here at Dallas Retirement Village.  In the above photo, a  Eurasian Collared-Dove has just delivered some nesting material to its nest building project under the eaves of the Lodge building. We also have several European Starlings building nests in similar locations. This morning we saw a pair of Dark-eyes Junco exit the bottom of a bush that could possible be a nest site. And of course I have been reporting on new nest building by the Osprey in Independence.

These are all encouraging signs that serve as a reminder that even in these troubled times, life in the natural world is still going on.