The dance....

Penelope and Moses are trying to figure out this co-existing thing. When one wants to come inside and the other wants to go out, I could stand there for five minutes, waiting for them to decide. 'You go first', 'no after you', 'no, i insist'. Usually one runs and hides under the end table, the other darts inside and then the other slinks out from under the table and through the door. It's like a dance.

Penelope likes to watch the birds through the picture window in the kitchen. She is tiny enough to perch in the shallow sill. She jumps up on the window sill above the big bathtub, too, another good spot for bird watching. The boys also love to watch the birds. We have set up two feeders, one on the porch rail and one on a shepard's hook below the window. Plus we have had good success attracting many different kinds of woodpeckers with a bar of compacted seed specially made for them. Chas and Simon are learning the names of the more common birds and every few days they'll see a new variety. They'll find the matching picture in the bird guide and ask me to read them the name and information. Recently we had our first goldfinch. We have also been seeing a lot of nuthatches and blue jays. The robins are not regular feeder visitors, preferring worms dug up from the ground, I guess. But we did find two robin's eggs in the yard. Researching on the internet, we found out that the mother robin discards the eggs from the nest after the babies hatch. She just strews them around. We think maybe she does this to confuse anyone looking for baby birds to eat for breakfast.