Bird watching

I love to hear birds singing, especially the mocking bird. We have lots of these birds in your yard and I find nests in the low shrubs, the pomgrante bush, the rose bushes, and in the grape vines. The mocking bird is easy to identify with its white markings on its wings and the skinny black legs. I do not get credit for this photo which shows the markings that helps one identify this songster.


Mocking birds sing any time of the day or night, and at times you aren't too happy to hear them singing like at 4 a.m. outside your bedroom window! I'll never forget the mocking bird that sang all afternoon outside my daddy's bedroom window the afternoon he was dying from cancer. He kept hearing the bird and thought it was beautiful. That bird stayed in the grape vine all afternoon and sang until my dad died late that night. It was eerie!


My mother loved birds too. When I was 5, Christine was 3 and Sue was a baby, we would accompany mother to the cowpen each evening and sit on the grass while she milked the cow. We walked down a sandy lane with trees and bushes on each side to get to the cowpen in the woods. Mother would see birds building nests and as soon as there were eggs in the nest, she would lift us up to see the speckled eggs, and told us to never touch them or the mother bird would not return to hatch them. Then we watched every day to see if the birds had hatched. Then one day they would start breaking out of the shells and were fuzzy little things and their eyes would be closed and they had no feathers yet. Then one day we stopped and mother told us to be very quiet and she would show us how the mother bird fed her babies. The mother bird eats and the regurgitates the food into the mouths of her babies. Mother ate some berries, and put some on her finger and dropped in into the open beaks of the baby birds and they enjoyed eating the blackberries. As she neared the nest they could hear the movement and would start making noises and opened their mouths. I found a photo to show exactly what we saw.


We have a birdbath in a flower bed in the back yard and this summer when we had a drought and it was so hot, we enjoyed watching the birds taking baths in our birdbath. Before we moved to town in 2003, we enjoyed redwing blackbirds (they used to chase the crows), kingfishers, herons, swallows, wrens, quail (we called them Bob Whites), and a variety of owls, as well as the noisy jay birds with the tall combs on their heads.


It was fun watching the mother bird teaching the littles one to fly, often pushing them out of the nest. They would land on the soft ground and were so helpless. After a lot of struggling they would eventually lift their wings and take off, with the mother bird in the background protecting them.

We saw a lot of quail on our farm and they look like little brown chickens. Daddy would bring home quail eggs if the bird had a nest on the ground where he was plowing and would have to destroy the nest. Mother would boil the tiny eggs and we would eat them.

Where we live now once was a wide open field and we have a large variety of birds. My favorite are the pretty bluebirds with bright red breasts. Our bluebird houses were filled this spring and summer. We have a variety of birds migrating through in the spring and summer. But the robins and mockingbirds are with us most all year long. We enjoyed a lot of brown thrashers this year and had to get out the bird book to identify them. I had not seen them here before this year.


Bird watching is a great sport and you can find such a variety at any time of the year, anywhere in the world.