These projects are for the birds!

The boys are back in town. All the male robins have arrived and are singing from the trees around our house. We are enjoying their songs until their ladies arrive. We want to keep as many birds in our yard as we can, so we are doing all we know to encourage them to settle here after they pair up.

We filled our bird feeder for the first time this spring and sprinkled cayenne pepper in with the seeds. I read that this is safe for the birds and keeps the squirrels away, but we'll have to see. We're watching out the window for proof. Usually, there is a hoard of squirrels literally hanging from our feeder and no birds in sight, so I really do hope this works.

We used a portion of a toilet paper roll and a hole punch to make a container to share nesting materials with the birds. I sliced up some fabric from my quilting basket and a piece of an old hand towel. Norah cut yarn and wrapping ribbon into 4, 6 and 8 inch strands, practicing her measuring skills. She collected an Easter basket full of little twigs and dry grass outside. We even clipped off some twine left on the poles in our vegetable garden from last summer to share with the birds.

We hope to catch a glimpse of birds flying away with materials from this container to use for their nests and maybe, this coming winter, we'll even be able to spot an empty nest with strands of our bright yarn woven in.

These projects were really messy, so we had to do a lot of sweeping. I can't bend over so well right now, being great with child, so Norah has learned how to hold the dust pan like a pro. You can see a picture of her helping me in the collage above. She's gotten so good at it and is so eager to do "big-girl" things like this, I may not have to hold my own dust pan in place for a while!

One of the other pictures in the collage above shows Norah holding two buttons I thought we'd lost in the yard this winter. We used them as the eyes on her snowman and didn't take them off before he melted and they fell into the layer of snow under him. But, Norah found them in the grass under the tree out front and was so excited, I think that was the best part of her day.