Well, my new field glasses finally arrived. I’m totally stoked. I gave up my Friday bike ride to wait for UPS, a decision for which the ramifications of are just now being made known. It’s never good for me to stay in the house most of the day. Regardless, I’ve been making good use of my time by spying on the birds. Upon closer inspection of the nuthatches I’ve decided that they are the street toughs of the songbird world. Most songbirds are pretty cute, and even when they bicker it’s still cute. But the nuthatches are just kind of ragged and surly. And they look really mean when they scare off the other birds. They flare up their wings and open their beaks really wide. Despite this, they are very curious birds to watch, and they move around in the most bizarre ways. I realize I’m repeating myself about the nuthatches and that most people will find this incredibly boring, but I don’t care. In other news the robins nesting in the oak tree out front have had their babies. I was spying on them today and saw their little mouths open wide waiting for mom and dad to drop some goodies in. The cardinal young have grown to about teenage size. I spotted a young female at the feeder this morning. A lot of the adults are molting (unless they all have mites or some sort of disease, which seems unlikely), which means we’ve seen a lot of cardinals showing up lately sporting mohawks or vulture-like bald heads. It’s kind of creepy. I’ve been reading about the phenomenon online, and it’s been said to be uncommon, yet we’ve seen a lot of these birds recently.