This is the male Baltimore Oriole that showed up in my yard yesterday!

I am only putting out grape jelly right now to attract the orioles. When it is a bit cooler I will also put out orange halves and nectar. I set up a pole system with just oriole feeders...everything orange!

Here's another Baltimore Oriole update! We had 2 in our yard on the 7th, another on the 8th! They're here!!!

I wanted to let everyone know that we had our first sighting of a Baltimore Oriole in Tallahassee by Joanne H, who came by the store today. Exciting!

Amalia has emailed us a couple more of her wonderful photos. Hope you enjoy them!

Piliated Woodpecker. We hear them a lot more than we see them, so this was a great sighting.

This is a baby Bluebird in Amalia's yard. I have several, too, that are hanging around every morning for a helping of mealworms.

Emily, our store companion, is recovering from a facelift!

Emily had a facial wrinkle that was rubbing against the bottom of her eyes. It was causing the eyes to cloud with pigment because of the rubbing. She would have eventually gone blind because of this. Her wrinkle was completely removed. Dr Patricia Novey did a wonderful job with the surgery. Emily will now be wearing this inflatable ring around her neck for a while to keep her from scratching her face. Even wrinkleless, we think she will be as cute as ever.

We raised Painted Lady Butterflies in the store in this case called A Butterfly Garden which we sell in the store. Today we released them!

Susan is releasing the Painted Lady butterflies.

This butterfly sat on the edge of the Butterfly Garden for a long time before it took off flying all around the yard.

A couple of the butterflies sat on the liriope flowers when they flew out.

A visit to St Marks National Wildlife Refuge on Friday, August 14th.

This Gray Kingbird was a life bird for Susan and myself. We were happy to get a fairly decent picture of it. We were using a Nikon Coolpix L100.

Tern, Tern, Tern...Royal Terns and Skimmers. This is a digiscope picture I took with my new Swarovski scope. We were at the lighthouse tower and these birds were far out on the sand beds.

Caspian Tern...This was also digiscoped with the Swarovski Scope and a Nikon 8400 Camera.

Not too great a picture, but worth sharing because this oprey had a huge fish... I think almost as long as he was.

Susan took this picture of Mary. Susan was using that new Coolpix she bought. You can also see the sheer beauty of St Marks NWR. It's my favorite place on earth!

The lighthouse at St Marks.

On our way out of the Refuge we noticed this alligator. We actually haven't seen too many of them there lately. We used to see so many more. Where are they?

At the end of the day, when we leave the refuge, I always say I would like to see a bobcat, a Florida panther, a black bear, and deer. We saw the deer as we were leaving. One down and three to go. In the past we have seen a bobcat and a black bear...I wouldn't mind the panther to add to that list!