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Spring
I’m coming up on my last 3 days for the academic year and reflecting now that my favorite season is upon us. Spring does that to me, especially now that I’ve been in the phased retirement contract for the last 2 years. I’ll be going into the 3rd and final year as of July. I…
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OK, Maybe Robins Can Build Nests Anywhere
I’ve been making fun of birds who build funny-looking and impractical nests. Maybe I’ve been wrong about the robins, though. My wife alerted me by phone that the robin I joked about in my YouTube video, “Nest Building for Bird Brains,” had actually cobbled together a convincing nest underneath our deck. I couldn’t believe it.…
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Bird Brains Building Nests
I just can’t figure how some birds ever get the nest-building job done. It’s mind-boggling how clueless some of them are. And it’s no wonder—they’re all bird brains trying to figure out something that they obviously don’t have much more than bare instinct to go on. Robins are some of the worst nest builders around.…
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Let’s Get Ready to Rumble!
Let’s get ready to rumble! It’s an egg laying contest. The competition is underway and let’s face it—the house finch has the title tails down. As of last Friday, the house finch had 5 white eggs in the nest, which is a typical clutch. The cardinal is probably going to end up with only two,…
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Bird Garden Update
I have some bird garden updates. As of a few days ago, we noticed a 4th egg was added to the front yard nest. I say that because there is a mysterious triad of birds now associated with the loosely woven and frankly untidy property. I caught a fair snapshot of a house finch male…
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Spring is for the Birds
Here’s an update on front-yard and back-yard birds, doing what birds always do in the spring–nesting. There were still only two cardinal eggs in the nest as of last Wednesday. There are no robin eggs in the nest; they would be blue. The parents are still pretty fussy (click on the images to see them…
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Cardinals vs Robins?
I’m not sure what to think about our cardinals. We saw the egg cache go from two to three—than back to two in the same day. No kidding, the nest gained a third egg in the morning and lost it in the afternoon. I looked all over the ground and couldn’t find it. Before that,…
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Oops, We Missed Earth Day 2019
Well, we missed Earth Day this year, which fell on April 22nd. The theme was to protect threatened and endangered species. One excuse is that we’ve been too focused on the cardinals building a nest in our back yard this spring. They are neither threatened nor endangered. I would call them fussy, especially when we…
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My Brother
Sometimes I think about my brother Randy, who died 19 years ago. His last days were made immeasurably easier by the caring staff at Hospice of North Iowa. He worked at a local artificial ice company for many years. He died when he was 43 of cancer, before either of our parents died. He will…
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Who is Harry Dumpty?
My wife and I spent a few months living in Madison, Wisconsin back in 2008. I had taken a new job as a psychiatrist there. It was the second of two blunders moving from academic medicine to private practice, the first being a move to Illinois, also very short-lived. We really liked Madison and sometimes…
Go Retire Psychiatrist 