A beautiful spring morning- about 50 degrees, the back yard is greening and filling up with ferns and ginger and lilies-of-the-valley with their delicate smell, celandine poppies, aquilegia, iris, heucera, button bush, ninebark, lots of things we’ve planted over the last few years.

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The wren house has this season become a chickadee house. This morning I watched as Mr. Chickadee went to get sunflower seeds from the feeder, break them open, and take the meat in to his mate, inside sitting on their nest, I imagine, made entirely of soft things (“…leaves, moss, grasses, snugly lined with hair, fur from small animals, and feathers.” from Birds of America, ed. Pearson, 1917), unlike the wren, who build their nests of “twigs, grass, feathers, spiders’ webs, and lined with soft strips of bark, down, or feathers.” On the other side of the fence in the neighbor’s driveway, not 15 feet away, robins are tending a nest built on the structure of a portable basketball hoop, decorating it with long strips of white toilet paper they’ve found somewhere, flying like streamers in today’s swift breeze. Mr. Wren would not stand for that proximity, but the chickadees and robins cohabit peacefully.

Not so much to do in the back yard anymore, which affords us leisure to go visit our wild friends at the arboretum, which we did last Easter Sunday, shown below.

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