Birds!

 It must be Spring! I saw my first Bluebird Sunday night :)

 He looked huge, but I imagine he was all puffed out to stay warm.  It was pretty frigid that night.  We had snow.

 These are red-winged black birds.  I'm not sure I got all of them in this picture, but my husband counted 82 of them in this group.

 My feeder has been very popular.  I can't keep it filled.  All the birds out here seem to prefer sunflower seeds, which is odd, because at my in-laws house the birds throw the sunflower seeds on the ground and eat everything else.  They only live about 6 miles from us.

 I love red winged black birds. They remind me of when I was a kid - they were all around our farm in Nebraska.  I tried for a long time to get a picture of one in flight because the color shows up so much more when they fly.  This is the best I could do.  I think I need a better camera. ;)

 Here they are in a tree in our yard.

 We have a lot of house finches too.

Some of these are so colorful. I love watching them.  They're the only ones that will come to the feeder on our window too.

I think this is just a cool picture.  My ten year old took this one, and I think I'm going to have him enter it in the fair.

 See the one on top of the feeder?  He heard me ;)

The red-winged blackbirds are quite a bit larger than the finches.  Here's a good comparison.  See the sunflower seed in the black bird's mouth?

Now look at the finch on top of the feeder, eating a sunflower seed a few minutes later.  I'm sure that's also why the finches are the only ones to come to the window feeder.  It's too tight of a space for the bigger birds.

We also get quite a few magpies, hawks, bald eagles, a few chickadees, and a woodpecker I haven't been able to identify yet.  It was grey.  I need to dig into my bird books and figure that one out. Ooh, and a couple of robins showed up the other day too.  Yep, disregard the snow.  Spring is here! (For that matter, we do have a little snow on the ground - still all covered thanks to the blizzard last night - but some of these pictures were taken up to a month ago.)