Saturday Morning Stroll
The weather is back to cold and wet. Before it started raining this morning I took a walk out back in the field to take some pictures.

I see this yellow warbler everyday. It is nesting in a small tree on the field side of the creek.

The yellow warblers are cute litte birds, only five inches long. They are very brave about staying in their tree while I walk around it.

This is a new bird for me. I wasn't sure what it was until I took this picture and used the bird book to identify it.

Next, I headed back to the far corner of our property to look for a fawn.

The past two mornings I've seen a deer jump the fence and head into the woods, but not far. I could hear her snorting while we finished our walk. She may have a fawn close by and I thought I might be able to find it and get a picture. No luck.

The does hide their young fawns in the daytime and leave them for hours at a time. I've never found a fawn on the ground, but I know others who have. They say the fawns are so well camouflaged you could step on them before you see them. I was very careful where I stepped.

The weeds, brush, and fallen branches and trees are very dense in that corner of the field. It would be easy to miss a little fawn. If the doe is back tomorrow morning, I'll give it another try.

Since the weather has been so wet and I know the bluebirds have fledged, I haven't opened the nest boxes in a week. This morning I hiked across the field to check on the swallow nest and was shocked to find a nest in the slotted box. The nest had very tall sides and was made with grass, dark feathers, and animal fur. When I reached my hand in to check for eggs, it was surprisingly warm inside, so I closed the nest box up quickly to keep the heat in.

The camera batteries were dead, so I didn't get a picture of the speckled eggs in the nest. I'll have a picture as soon as the weather permits.

What kind of nest is it? I'm not sure. It's a little too tidy to be a house sparrow nest, and I was told/sold that house sparrows don't go into the slotted nest boxes.

It could be a chickadee nest, but the eggs looked a little large to be a chickadee. So I have a mystery to solve if it will only warm up a little and stop raining.

As for the tree swallow nest in the box with the hole, it has six beautiful eggs due to hatch this weekend. The tree swallows hatch naked - no feathers. I'm not going to open their box again until the weather gets over 70 F or they've had time to grow some feathers, whichever comes first.