Our Backyard Florida Friends

I was never really interested in birds until I noticed how excited Caroline was about birds last fall. While Tim was deployed, I would take the kids to my parents' house for the weekend quite often. My parents have a beautiful view from their kitchen...a huge open window that sits in front of the breakfast table. They have bird feeders galore in their backyard, so every morning it looks as though a migrating flock is stopping by for breakfast before continuing their journey south. When I saw over and over again how excited my newly turned two-year-old daughter was to see the birds, I decided I needed to get into the hobby of bird watching, for her sake. I could not resist after hearing her say "choo, choo" and sign the word for bird. I used to think of birds as rodents with wings, mainly because the birds at my college campus used to swoop at students as they crossed campus. Can you believe I had to duck a time or two?

I believe it was the mourning doves that kept nesting in a hanging plant on my back porch once or twice every year that warmed my heart up towards birds. They seemed to have some type of connection when us...every time we seemed to go to the hospital to have a baby, the birds either were nesting or tending to their baby birds. Mourning doves mate for life, so we are pretty sure they are the same two doves that come back time and time again. They take shifts sitting on the eggs so I'm not sure if the picture is of the male or female bird. However, we have named them (Fertile) Myrtle and Turtle (Dove). They seem to be very fitting names. The picture above is one that Tim took of one of the doves sitting on the baby birds a few days after we came home from the hospital with Tyler. And to the right are the baby birds.

We now have a bird feeder and bird bath and have attracted several birds since. It almost seems like a couples retreat for birds. We do have both a blue jay and a cardinal couple that are regular guests at our feeder year around. I don't have any pictures of the blue jays.

Harriet & Ozzie, our cardinals.

We named Ozzie after Ozzie Smith who played on the Cardinals. And how can you have an Ozzie without a Harriet? Anyways the whole family has enjoyed watching the birds from the window and porch swing. It will be interesting to see what type of birds we will see in Oklahoma. I know we will see the migration of the Canadian geese and huge flocks of black birds.