Birds

A few weeks ago, I discovered that the phoebe was not the only bird who had a nest near my house. According to my bird-brained mom (and by "bird-brained" I mean my mom has lots of bird books :)) this is a mourning dove:

This was a few weeks ago, and I took the picture through my window so I wouldn't scare the bird.

This was yesterday, when one of the baby birds (who appears to be almost as big as Mom Bird) was finally flapping around outside the nest. I took this one through the window again, but then I decided to venture outside and see if I could get closer...

And I was surprised that she actually let me get this close without flying away. You can only see one of the baby birds in this picture...

But I went outside again today (where you can see it's nice and sunny, as opposed to yesterday when we got repeated downpours...) and was able to get a picture of the mom bird and both babies. Although this time I was only able to snap three pictures before the mom bird flew away and sat on the fence to get away from the crazy human with the camera. And then as I was walking back into the house, a phoebe, who has been sitting on the nest in the corner of the back porch, took off from the nest to avoid my return to the house and perched on the fence. So I took a few pictures of her, too. This is my favorite one, because I think it shows us what would happen if we asked a phoebe for directions to the nearest Starbucks:

"Well, see, ya gotta go down Parmer, and take a right at the HEB... it's right there in the shopping center... can't miss it..."