Birds!

Don't bother looking for the orioles in this picture.  There is simply no way I am talented enough to capture their frenetic movements.

My neighbors moved this last fall.  I was just beginning to enjoy their absence when I, too, changed locale.  A lasting effect of their move has been the absence (for whatever reason) of their outdoor cat.  The result is my yard is alive with birds.  Just this morning, sitting on my deck I saw not a single male oriole, but three or four mating pairs; and not high in the bare catalpa, my typical sighting location, but sitting in my viburnum, and the lower branches of my sugar maple.

Orioles are not the only bird I see on a regular basis this year.  There is a nesting pair of sapsuckers (the bane of the now gone Austrian black pine), and more than a single pair of mourning doves.  Yesterday, there was a bird on bird on bird battle as a jay, robin and grackle swooped it out over prime nesting grounds, I am sure.

It may have something to do with the maturity of the shrub and orchard tree alley border, or the fact that with this gardener's incapacitation, all my perennials were left uncut in the fall clean-up.

Regardless.

The birds are here.