Here is my FoF. We have a lot of spring birds around now, including Bluebirds! There were about five Eastern Bluebirds across the road in a field. About four males, which were all fighting. Later that day we saw a male and female Bluebird checking out some nests!! So exciting! Finally we will probably get bluebirds nesting near our house. We hear them calling a lot/
Here are some pictures. We have more, but they'll come in a Spring Birding post.
Here is the male checking out a hole in a old tree. For those who are a veeerryy long time follower, which I don't know if there are, this is the tree I found some abandoned eggs in like three or four years ago. I made a post about it, that was very near the beginning of my blog's life.
William took these photos.
Eastern Bluebird male
The other site they are checking out is a bird box! Exciting!
We got a batch of chicken eggs we got from our friends that we hatched. We started them about a month ago, they take three weeks to hatch. We had a very good hatch rate, 30 out of 36 eggs hatched. We each chose a couple chicks to look after and play with, but it sometimes got hard to tell them apart when they all were hatched.
The chicks in the brooder
We built a box for them and took them outside a bit when they were old enough, plus, it was much better for pictures than in the brooder.
The chick I chose, it has characteristic black feet and beak, so I can tell it apart from the others.
My chick!
Here's another chick
We didn't take all of them outside, just a bunch.
There is a bare-necked chicken in the pile with a stripe on his head that we called Trouble, because it was always trying to get out, or running through the sleeping chicks waking them all up, and he would barely ever let you pick him up.
"Chicken pileup!"
We gave them back to our friends a couple days ago, we might hatch another batch next year and keep them.
Here is a video I got of a chick hatching to end the blog post.
There is a cavity nest in a field across our road. It is a hole nest in a dying tree. The tree is small and still has some leaves, but most of the top is cut off and it is starting to rot. The entrance hole is 3 1/2 cm wide and 4 cm tall leading to a cavity more than 10 cm deep. Their is a small grass nest with four completely white eggs. Each egg is about an inch tall. I have visited the nest site several times, each time seeing no birds in the nest. I see Savannah Sparrows singing very near the nest, but they nest on the ground and don't have white eggs. So I assume it is abandoned, I can't touch the eggs to see if they're warm because they are too deep in the cavity. It might have been a woodpecker nest before but now it looks abandoned.
