It's official. We are "bird grandparents." Every basket hanging on our porch contains a nest of some kind of bird. We go through this every year, with last year being the absolute most stressful spring of my life. I don't mind them building their nests in our hanging baskets on the porch...in fact we love peering at them through the slats in our plantation shutters, BUT they got a little invasive last year and went and built nests in all of our air vents for our bathroom fans. Needless to say, I was gritting my teeth the first time I turned on our bathroom fan over the shower to take out steam and heard who knows what being ground by the fan blades. I quickly shut it off and then yelled for Randy. It was shortly thereafter that we started hearing movement above our heads, like birds, lots of birds, moving around. I told Randy we'd give them this year, then no more nests in our vents.

So, Randy, and our brother in law, Larry (who always gets the crummy jobs, but smiles through them all) took his long arms and pulled all the straw out of our vents. To keep them from coming back this year, we balled up chicken wire and placed them at each entrance. Sure enough, those little creatures of habit came back and they pecked for weeks trying to get back in to those vents. It can be very unnerving, especially if you saw Alfred Hitchcock's, "The Birds" when you were a child, like I did. (I can't believe some of the stuff our parents took us to see at the drive-in movies back in those days!)

Mourning doves seem to have squatting rights in the first basket near our window. They have an exceptionally long fledgling period in my opinion. They appear to be teenagers before they fly the coup (nest in this case.) It was quite interesting this year, watching how Mom and Dad would probably be hiding behind leaves in the nearby elm tree watching the kids as they tried to wean themselves away from them. It reminded me of Leah when she was 4, wanting to exercise a little independence, telling me she wanted to go outside by herself. I complied and would shut the door telling her not to go near the street and she'd readily reply, "I am't." Then I'd glue myself to the wall, and peek from behind the curtain until she was safely back in the house, asking her to recount her big adventure alone. She was just happy as a little lark.

The baby doves were no different. They'd perch themselves on the very edge of the basket and you could just imagine one of them saying to the other, "Look at me!" Then they'd flutter their wings in pride at their accomplishment. We knew it was getting closer to "TIME" when Mom and Dad stayed away for a whole day and didn't return until dinnertime. They were all gone within two days.

I decided it was time to pinch off dead geranium flowers finally. Randy had already installed a drip mist system so we wouldn't have to disturb them and could ensure our flowers stay watered, plus we read recently that watering them doesn't hurt them, so we'd spray from a distance, a fine mist. I figured if those doves took that long to mature, surely all the other nests would be empty by now. Not so. To be continued...