...and pictures from June

[thanate]

Rare sighting of Mrs. House Wren, poking her head out of the birdhouse.

BOTH wrens, AT ONCE! (ooh, aah!)

Mr Wren is perched on the fence, slightly to the left of the pole from here. Picture taken June 2, but they're still around.

A picture that most astonishingly includes actual frog eggs:

It is possible that the dark spot in the bottom center (which the dark leaf is pointing to) is a tadpole, but I can offer you no surety.

And this, though lovely, is not a picture of tadpoles at all:


June 3, taken from the back deck; the tree on the right was doing fiery glowing things.


...And today!

This is the front garden (yes, I know I need to mow the lawn.) The extra tall thing at the far left is the other mystery plant from last year, but I am quite certain it did not come with a label warning me it might get 6 feet high, as I would not have planted it in front of the blueberry bush had that been the case. The beebalm is still at it, and the swamp milkweed is the pink thing just starting out in front of it.

Beyond the crazy aster, the butterfly weed is still going strong, but the sundrops are trailing off.

This is what the pond looks like today:


The iris is done blooming & on to making more iris:


The pickerelweed is on round 2:


And the water arum is being rather exciting, too:

Comments

[tam_nonlinear]

Does your wren house have cogwheels on the side?

My wrenlings have fledged. The last week they were in the house, I clocked the parents at a feeding every 40 seconds or so. It was exhausting just to watch. One of the reasons I want more plants is more plants mean more bugs and move cover for fledglings, which means more birds.

[thanate]

I have not been seeing frequent feedings, so I'm not quite sure what's going on with that... possibly they are still incubating after all?

The birdhouse (which I had no expectation of anyone actually using) was meant to be steampunk-ish, so yes, there are a bunch of wooden gears glued on.

[tam_nonlinear]

I think they only hit that rate on the last few days, so maybe yours are still young yet. They fledge fairly quickly.

[tam_nonlinear]

p.s. most of the townhouses have the sort of privacy fenced that have a a couple of horizontal supports and then vertical boards alternating sides, with some overlap. The parent wrens seemed to find this to a great hunting site, as a lot of their scavenging involved running along the horizontal supports. So I assume the wrens were catching a lot of spiders that way.

This birding blog says that parent wrens can rack up 1000 feedings a day with a busy brood. I also love the description of the female wren tossing out half the nesting material the male wren had built.

[thanate]

Cool!

And if they want to take some of my spiders, we've got plenty.

[queenoftheskies.livejournal.com]

I love the house wrens! We used to have those when I lived in Nashville. Sadly, not here in CA, though I saw a ginormous heron on the way to drop Amanda off at school this morning. You should have seen that wingspread!

I also love your pond. Are you going to be inundated with frogs, do you think?

[thanate.livejournal.com]

I wasn't really aware of house wrens before; previously "wren" to me meant the carolina ones, but at this point I might even recognize other house wrens if I heard them. :)

I don't really know who the frogs are going to turn out to be; most of what I've been hearing are tree frogs, so it may be that all the tadpoles wander off again once they've hatched. We'll see!

[podisodd.livejournal.com]

Hee! Mrs. Wren has the, "what are you doing on my lawn? Leave!" look on her face.