The next generation is here
I came home from my trip last week to find a yard full of young birds. Fledglings were everywhere it seemed, and their voices resonated from every tree and every likely perch. When we had left on our trip, the Red-bellied Woodpecker babies had just left their nest. They were still very dependent on their parents to find food for them. A week later, I returned to find very competent young woodpeckers visiting the feeders on their own and feeding themselves without any instruction or assistance from parents. Before we left, I had seen one or two young Northern Cardinals following their papa around, but now everywhere I look in the garden there seems to be a cardinal with a dark beak marking it as a youngster and they are feeding themselves and obviously are on their own. It's hard to count just how many there are, because, of course, they move around a lot, but I feel certain there is more than one family here. Cardinals tend to be somewhat less aggressively territorial than so...