The hummingbirds have really been sucking the feeders dry this week, despite the abundance of jewelweed around the house. After two years of trying to get cardinal flowers planted in the back yard, one has volunteered in the front yard. I am not sure how it got there.
Yesterday morning I watched a chickadee fold his head under his wing and go to sleep, oblivious to me reading just 15 feet away. I was surprised that it did this sitting completely exposed on the edge of my birdbath. Today (Sunday) I stopped by the sod farms in Empire township. there were no shorebirds on the Jirik farm fields, but the Braun fields west of there by the red house had a couple of pools with hundreds of shorebirds. Most flew further back out of view, but I was still able to count nine species including Black-bellied Plover, Stilt, Pectoral, Bairds, Least, and Semi-palmated Sandpiper, and a Dowitcher. A walk out to Sand Point turned up ten species of warbler, including a Cerulean. Yesterday I found a beautiful hawk moth in the yard with a wingspan of about three inches: a White-lined Sphinx moth (Hyles lineata) (formerly called a Striped Mourning Sphinx moth (Celerio lineata). Steve Weston on Quiggley Lake in Eagan, MN sweston2 at comcast.net
