Wednesday, May 9, 2007

Orioles & Hummingbirds


I finally had the first hummingbird show up at one of my feeders around 8:00 this evening. It was a female. I was just getting ready to clean them up and put out fresh nectar. They may have been here before today, but this was the first one I actually saw so May 9th is what will be documented in my book. Today's first sighting is about right in the middle of arrivals since I started recording in 2002. The latest first arrival was May 14, 2003 and the earliest was May 3rd of last year.

The orioles are back now. It's so nice to hear them singing all around the neighborhood.


I got this nice, heavy ceramic bowl at Wal-Mart the other day for $1.77. It just fits in the tray and I don't have to worry about it blowing away. It's nice because it's kind of an orange-ish color and it holds lots of grape jelly, plus if I add mealworms, I don't have to worry about them crawling out either. The orioles have accepted it very nicely. (Yes, I know I said I was NEVER going to shop at Wal-Mart again, but we just needed a couple of things and were in a hurry and it's still the closest trip from home....till SuperTarget opens.)


Here's a nice looking male oriole that showed up this evening. He's a hungry fellow, but it appears he has had some sort near-death experience with a predator.....judging by his obvious lack of tail feathers.


He doesn't seem to have any other injuries and his flying capabilities don't seem handicapped either. Hopefully his tail feathers will grow back soon. In the meantime, he will be easy to distinguish from the other orioles when he comes to visit the jelly dish.

2 comments:

Larry said...

-It's so nice to have Orioles in the yard.-They probably don't even know they're eating from a blue light special-(or is that k-mart?)

RuthieJ said...

They also don't know they're eating the Target Market Pantry jelly and not Welch's! I'm glad my orioles aren't fussy