It’s always exciting to see the first bird of the year of a given species. This time of year that’s apt to happen more than once a day if you go out birding. Today we had our first-of-year northern oriole (for Massachusetts; there was one in our yard in Casco last Tuesday), catbird, and rose breasted grosbeak.
The grosbeak is the most exciting, I think, because there have been many years when we didn’t see any of them. We saw a lot of them last year on our walks around Nahanton Park and were hoping we had learned how to find them. Maybe we have!
Yesterday we saw a black-and-white warbler, yellow-rumped warbler, and yellow warbler and got good long looks at palm warblers. Today was less good for warblers, but I did get a (not awfully good) picture of a yellow:
… and this house wren looks very much as though he wishes I hadn’t seen him:
The grandkids were at our house for about an hour after school today. We picked them up at school and took them to their house first. While Maija attended a food science class over the computer, we were keeping Ari busy in their backyard with riding toys and a kids play tent that we just barely got set up before Maija’s class was over and it was time to go back to our house. Ari found “Flight of the Jacquins”, a board game about characters from the Disney series Elena of Avalor that we had played before the pandemic. We set it up and he and I played it, not necessarily according to the rules. It’s a case of “oh yes, I remember that we had that toy, let’s use it for five minutes and see what else is here that I haven’t thought about in a year.”