Oriole nest decorations

When I was taking the photos I showed you yesterday, I happened to notice a baltimore oriole nest in our maple tree. They have made a nest in that tree every year for several years now.

I also noticed that this nest had something blue hanging from it. If you look REALLY close, you can barely see it in this next photo, below and to the left of the nest.

I took those pics in the morning, so there was too much contrast against the sun to see very well. I had also taken them through a window. I waited till late afternoon, and then I went outside to get some better photos. See? Now you can see the blue I was talking about:

You can see how it was woven through the nest, and some comes out the bottom:

You know what it was? It was ribbon! Ribbon for wrapping packages. The kind with the ridges on it so you can curl it with a scissors. If you click on these last two photos to enlarge them, you can see the ridges.

There were also some bits of blue and orange twine woven through the nest. Pretty fancy decorating, I'd say! I wonder where they got the ribbon. Off a balloon, perhaps?

As I've been writing this, the more I look at that photo at 100% size, the more I see. That nest is amazingly elaborate! I cropped that one photo down and loaded it at full size below. Click on it to enlarge it and see all the details. It's amazing!

I can't even tell what it's made of. It looks like a lot of man-made materials, not grasses or anything. There are even some green strips of 'something' holding it to the branch. Wow!

I sure would like to see them build one sometime, but of course when they do it, it's all behind the cover of leaves. I rarely know the nests are there until the leaves fall off the trees.

Happy birds

Sunday was SUCH a lovely day... sunny, 62° and no wind! All that new snow has melted and a lot more of the old, dirty stuff, too - hurray! The birds are much happier now!

Listening, listening, listening......

I saw one pull something out of the ground on Sunday, but I'm not sure if it was a worm or not.

The blackbirds were singing from the treetops and doing their wingspread thing, too.

Earlier I'd shot these blackbirds from the bathroom window. This one is somewhat shaded by an evergreen tree, but his pretty blueish head still shows up. That beak is kind of mean-looking.

Out in the sunshine, they are so glossy!

This old oriole nest caught my eye, too. It seems to have survived all of last winter's strong winds very much intact.

Soon the birds will be nesting again. More photo opportunities. :)

I found another one!

Can you see it? Hanging from the tree near the center of the photo.

Here's a closer look.

Yep, it's another oriole nest! I'd noticed it a couple weeks ago, but I couldn't get near enough to it to take a decent picture, because I'd have sunk over my knees into the snow. But this morning I noticed that the snow has gotten hard enough that I can walk on top of most of it, so I headed back to the house and grabbed the camera. I could get right up underneath the nest!

Just look at the intricacy of that work! Here are several different views.

It looked to be mostly made of "threads" from plastic twine that's used to wrap hay bales. The salmony orange and turquoise make a nice color combination, don't you think? What a lot of work those birds did!

I had found a stick that I thought I could hook the branch with and pull it down far enough to cut the branch and get the nest for even closer examination. (I even had a little pruner in my pocket to cut it off with.)

(Click any photo to enlarge.)

Unfortunately, when I got it far enough down that I could jump up and grab the tips of the longest branches, they broke off in my fingers. So the pic above is the best I could do. But just look at how that twine is wrapped around those branches! Wow! I would love to watch them doing all that!

And don't miss that AWESOME blue sky!!!! It was just so gorgeous out this morning! I took many more photos, so be expecting to see them in the days ahead.

I've always wondered.....

How can it get foggy when it's so COLD out (as in -10°)?!

But apparently it did get foggy last night, as this is how our trees look this morning.

Did you notice that little thingy right in the middle of the picture? It's the oriole nest. It must really be fastened up there well to have survived the gusty winds we've had. Here's a closer look.

My apologies for the pics not being as clear as usual. They were taken from the warmth of my house, and that means they were also taken through plastic. :-)