Hummingbird courtship

We've had a female hummingbird at our feeders and visiting Monarda and Lonicera flowers for some weeks. But eating lunch on the porch today, we were excited to see a pair of hummingbirds circle up and then down, and then disappear on the ground. Woo-hoo!

Checking out All About Birds (Cornell Lab of Ornithology), Journey North, and Operation Ruby Throat, it seems promising that this was the final courtship ritual prior to mating, so maybe we'll have a hummingbird nest & babies in the next few weeks.

Here in the Southeast, we apparently can have double broods, so maybe our pair will be producing one of these!

A waiting male bluebird

There's a male bluebird perched on a favored bluebird house at the edge of the Garden's meadows (at the botanical garden where I work) almost every morning now. I haven't looked in the box yet, but nesting activity should be well underway.

I normally would like to be monitoring the boxes weekly, but this spring has found many gardening programs, activities, and other non-bluebird tugs on my time.

Bluebirds thrive in the Garden's varied habitats of meadows adjacent to woods, and we've had bluebird boxes up for many years, recently replaced a couple of years back thanks to a Youth Build program based at our university.

We usually have 12-18 successful broods per year from our eleven Garden boxes, with occasional casualties due to black rat snakes (our boxes don't have baffles).

In our home landscape, we don't have the right habitat for bluebirds, although occasionally we'll see one investigate. They're lovely birds and have their populations have rebounded with increased placement of boxes to replace the lost natural cavities that they would otherwise use.

The bluebird image is from a Nature Conservancy birding journal -- quite nice. I wish I could credit the artist.