The sparrows started building a nest in our front-yard box, but progress seems intermittent…
A pair of Cooper’s Hawks have been hauling off rodents and shredding songbirds at a steady pace, so we think they’re nesting nearby.
Taken diagonally through two layers of rather dirty 1955-ish window glass with the Sony DSC-H5 and the 1.7× tele-adapter, so it’s not the best of images… but if I were a rodent, I’d be worried!
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Even though we are in Still-Winter (next season is Construction/Fire), the bird feeder is getting lots of customers. The pigeons and doves strive to get on the tray, but usually eat what’s on the ground. We’re getting lots of sparrows and a variety of finches. Julie says the early Jays (we get Stellar’s, darker colored but as feisty as a blue jay) are here, but not too many blackbirds yet. We get a wide variety of BBs, including red-winged and yellow-bodied. No bugs for the woodpeckers at the feeder, but I’m hearing a few.
We have enough pines near the house so that the hawks and eagles don’t get too close to the feeder. We’re cutting some of those trees, so we’ll see what happens. I’ve noticed the little guys using our deck as a safe zone, so there’s hope for them.
The forsythia along the north side of the yard recently filled up with a mixed flock of sparrows, red-winged blackbirds, starlings, grackles, and miscellaneous little gray birds: they hold a noisy convention inside there during most of the day!
We just got an inch of “Still-Winter”, actually graupel and snow, A couple of really tough nuthatches are enjoying the fact that nobody else is dumb enough to visit the feeder. They fit right in with the town…
I think nuthatches look like wannbe penguins: same snappy paint job, but a little too pointy up front.