Spring Birds

Blooms are always exciting and abundant in spring. I have plenty to show you, but not much time to blog about them. Instead, today I want to share a few birds that have caught my attention.



This hummingbird arrived about a week ago. It has been visiting my coral honeysuckle vine often and lingering long enough for me to leave the room, get my camera and take several minutes worth of pictures.

I'm glad to see that she (he?) prefers the vine to the sugar water feeder that is nearby. Last year, I was expecting hummers on my turk's cap blooms, but the birds opted the "fast food" feeders. It was disappointing. The blooms seems like a more wholesome food.


Yesterday, I was very excited to learn that my dying maple tree is good for something. A pair of golden fronted woodpeckers that live in the area have chosen it for their nest.

Within the last week and a half, I've noticed that the usually timid woodpeckers have been strangely vigilant about chasing other birds away from the tree. This explains it. The pair is probably incubating eggs in there. If all goes well, in another week or so there will be 4-5 babies, and about a month after that, they should  be fledging. The maple tree is not long for this world. It has a lot of problems. It still hasn't leafed out, but thank goodness. If it had, we might not have seen the nest.


This is the male woodpecker. I can tell because he has the red splotch on his head. He's very furtive about taking peanut butter from the tree so forgive the bad shots, but I wanted you to see the proud parent.

Coral Honeysuckle

Coral honeysuckle was one of the first plants to turn ratty this fall. Now, it's one of the first ones to start  blooming in the spring.


Watching this plant get started after the winter is like watching Benjamin Button grow young. First, the dry vines that I thought might have died put on curled yellow and maroon tinged foliage. The leaves look freeze damaged so it's easy to think they've been there all winter, but no, they're new.


Then over the course of a few days, the leaves start to unfurl and turn green. Next, trombone shaped flowers appear sporadically. Within a few weeks, the entire the vine will be lush and splotched with pink bouquets.


I thought that parts of my honeysuckle had died during the winter, and if they had, I was looking forward to the opportunity to trim the dead wood and give the vine a make over.

Coral honeysuckle is a twiner, not a climber. It needs a trellis. My lazy attempts to hoist the vine by its limbs and heave its weight over the fence have resulted in the pitiful, knotted mess pictured above.


Thankfully, this weekend, I found a free solution that makes the vine look 100 times better. We took apart our temporary compost bins that were made of pig fencing and repurposed the material as a trellis for the honeysuckle. 


Tah dah! What a difference, right?! Free, recycled and refreshed. Bring on the blooms.