A Second Look--August 28, 2013

We had a few wonderful days of cooler weather that lulled us into thinking that maybe fall was here. However, real August days returned with temperatures in the 90's with high humidity soon enough. The flower workhorses of the summer have continued to add their color. Some of these include blanket flowers, marigolds, celosia and coneflowers. Acutally most of the coneflowers have finished blooming and the goldfinch are starting to enjoy their seed heads.

The bird feeder has had a lot of activity and is interesting to watch as we see which birds don't mind sharing and which birds would rather have everything to themselves. We had a particularly aggressive male house finch one day that thought it was his job to keep other birds away. This is not typical for the finches as there are usually several there at the same time. And speaking of aggressive birds, I think the baby blue birds are still in the nest. When I got to that part of the yard today, the parents were dive bombing me from two directions. Enough so that I couldn't go into the lower part of the yard to take a Second Look. I guess technically I could have, but the birds aggressively whizzing within an inch of my head scared me. Has anyone seen the Alfred Hitchcock movie The Birds?

Here are a few things I saw this week during a Second Look.