Finches: Their Diner and Nest of Four Eggs

Look what I found in our honeysuckle arbor today: a tiny nest of finch eggs!

I have been feeding finches for about two months from one of those bird feeder net socks. The feeder sock is about five feet from the honeysuckle arbor, so it is a convenient diner for mom and dad and soon-to-be kiddos. There are four eggs in the nest, and I was very careful in not leaving my scent too near the nest.

Catherine wrote this blog post about wrens nesting in cactus, and it spurred me to get a ladder out and look up into the honeysuckle branches where finches seem to be nesting. Sure enough, there were the pretty little eggs in a wee little nest.

It takes 21 days for chicken eggs to hatch, but only 14-16 days, according to Yahoo Answers, for finch eggs to hatch.

What is hatching in your neighborhood?

Foxes

Update: here is another Mama Fox and Baby Fox taken less than an hour ago about 1/2 mile from our house:

These shots were as good as I could get with my camera on ZOOM mode from about 15 yards away.

Pictures from around the Neighborhood

On my morning walk yesterday, nature paid off big time. I saw a fox! But alas, no picture of her. I think it was a female, because she looked a big pudgy and maybe ready to birth a kit.
Near where she was glimpsed, I found a burrow. Could it have been a foxhole? Probably it was a rabbit's hole. The entrance had a dig out that veered off to the left at a fairly sharp angle.


The hole in that tree trunk below could have been an animal's home, but likely it was just an interesting architectural phenomenon of the fallen cottonwood.

Happily walking along the road back from the neighborhood open space area for walking, and while listening to Julie D's Huffduffer podcasts on my iPod, here was a cairn I came across:

It looks like a happy face to say "have a good Memorial Day Weekend"! Every time I walk by, a new object will be added to the cairn, until someone messes up the playhouse. I'm thinking maybe a charm from my beading collection will be added today.