Our Tweet-Tweets

One of our family pasttimes is watching birds. We have a feeder outside our kitchen window that always seems to fascinate us all. Granted we mostly get house finches and chickadees (or "chickadeedeedees" as Reder says), we get our fair share of Evening Grosbeaks, Chipping Sparrows, and we have even had a Lazuli Bunting a couple of times. Ruby calls birds "tweet tweets", and she is always on the look out. Jason has a feeder at work too - here are some house finches:

Then we had a pair of house finches build a nest in a wreath I had on my front door. They had six eggs and six babies! They were rather unrecognizable at first:
And they could sure get hungry! We could hear them tweet like crazy from inside our house, usually when their mom was bringing them food. We enjoyed them, though they ruined the wreath and left a massive glob of poop on the door.

The babies grew up enough to leave the nest, but they still are with their parents. We see them every day at the feeder. It's cute because there is quite a ruckus, and the mom and dad are usually saying something in tweet, which is much more calm and just pretty, while the babies just tweet like crazy and ruffle their tail feathers.

One day a finch was sitting on our back deck. We were guessing he hit the window and was stunned for a bit. Jason put out a branch and he hopped on. The kids of course thought this was really giggle-worthy. He eventually flew away but we had some fun talking to him for a little while, and he even hopped on Reder's shoulder very briefly before he took off. Pretty neat!