Backyard Birding

The next Great Backyard Bird Count is February 17-20, 2017!

You can find more info HERE and find out how you can participate. 

We bought a new home in December and moved in just a couple weeks before Christmas. We fell in love with the home because of the trees on our lot. We have 8 in the backyard and 2 in the front. The ones in the backyard are HUGE! I'm sure they will be the death of me in the fall, but they are pretty amazing in the summer (from what I've seen in pictures). 

Since moving in, we have spotted so many birds! We decided to start a list. We also picked up some bird seed and made some feeders so we could better study our little visitors.

I'll share a tutorial below.

We used grapefruit rinds as the bowl and some string. Thats all  you need!

The birds love them! Our trees are busy all morning long. It's been fun to wake up to dozens of little birds in our trees and surprisingly, we have had the feeders out for over a week now and there are still seeds in the bowl!

 We found this book at our local Wild Bird store, along with the wild bird seed.

 This is a great book we found at the library, all about birds and how they fly, such great info and pictures. 

 We also love this matching game that we found on Amazon, it matches male and female birds.

And this incredible book we found at costco a few years ago. The images are incredible! (pictured above)

We found this water color book on amazon. It has tutorials on how to paint animals.

  #WhereTheGreenFernGoes had to try painting too!

 We start with the $.99 crayola water color sets, and as the kids learn how to use them, we move them up to nicer sets. So far, we are only up to a target water color set level, but the older kids are ready to move on to something better.

 Our binoculars are awful! So we have been using my zoom lens on my nikon to get a closer look at the birds in our yard. Pictured above is a downey woodpecker!

These last two shots were taken by my daughter through the screen so they aren't very clear but you can spot a black capped chickadee below and a spotted-towhee above!

So far we have spotted:

red tailed hawk

magpie

belted king fisher

black capped chickadee

dove

downy woodpecker

hairy woodpecker

white-breasted nuthatch

robin

spotted-towhee

and several that we couldn't find in our bird book