Little Things I've forgotten to share

First - there are hummingbirds at our feeder daily. Many times a day we get these amazing little visitors! The feeder hangs just outside the window where our kitchen table sits, and our meals are filled with "oh! oh! oh!" as we hush our conversation and stare out the window...

We have a sky filled with chimney swifts - we have yet to watch to see which chimney they make their home in, but the evenings are filled with their chatter. One day while my mom and sister were visiting there was a knock on the door. It was a woman holding one of the swifts in her hand - she had seen it knocked to the ground by a passing biker and it was stunned. She happened to be a vet tech and wondered if she could put it behind one of our bushes? I asked what else I could do for it; she told me her advice for any bird that is stunned by running into something (like a window): put it in a paper bag, in the shade. This gives it a quiet, safe place to rest and recuperate. When it starts to move around and flutter, open the bag and when it's ready, it will fly out. It took quite a while for our little swift to revive, and finally my mom suggested that maybe it was waiting for dusk? We put the open back behind a bush for protection and left it there until dark. When we checked in the morning, it was gone!

We went for a hike in Zaleski forest while my family was here, and as the girls were running ahead on the trail, Eliza shrieked for us to hurry up, there was a mole!!! I think it was a mole, quite dead, so we had a good look at it (and yes, I have a photo, but no, I won't post it!!). I decided to move it off the trail and lifted it gently with a couple of small sticks, and there was another shriek from Eliza - she spotted a burying beetle crawling under it!!! This was so exciting for us, and though it was moving so quickly that I couldn't tell if it was the same species we worked with (there are many), it was neat to see it in the wild, doing what we had been told it would do! Lucky beetle, to have found such a good source of food...