Did I happen to mention it’s cray-cray season around here in bird land?

It’s something we confirmed this weekend when Tim and I spent a couple of hours in the backyard doing the difficult Spring work of SITTING AROUND WATCHING while the entire animal kingdom struts, preens and prods in an effort to find romantic, even if temporary, love. I haven’t seen so much chasing, and running from, and then just happening to show back up activity since college! The finches were so aggressive they came within a foot of my head on multiple occasions, not one bit concerned that I was a human minding my own business there under the shelter of the walkout porch. Next thing I know the two males are fretting like crazy, flying from the gutter to the screen, and screen to gutter, their little wings flapping furiously.

I go to investigate and discover the two females have somehow squeezed themselves through the tiny opening where the screen porch door is off-kilter, and with them on the inside, and the males on the outside, you’ve never heard such carrying on!

It took some time and some engineering that involved a bit of birdseed, but I did eventually manage to get all four of them on the same side–the outside–of the screen porch. A couple of hours later I walked down to my studio, looked out the window and caught sight of this.

It was my favorite moment of Spring, this sweet scene during which reunited, the male fed the female beak-to-beak, his sign of love, a demonstration of his commitment to their family, his promise to her.

Thank you, Spring. You bring so many gorgeous reminders that in spite of it all, the world is still a very beautiful place.