Orioles

When I was little, I spent a great deal of time with my grandmother. She was teh original fun granny, letting us do many things my mother would never have allowed: ice cream for breakfast, "science" experiments mixing up whatever we could find in the kitchen, lots of messy crafts. We did lots of paint-by-number projects with my grandmother; most of them were regular pictures, but one summer she had bird figurines for us to paint, and mine was a Baltimore oriole. It was much more difficult to paint than my sister's robin, and it was very messy. But because I had never actually seen an oriole, it seemed very exotic to me.

Fast forward many years to last summer. I had been paying attention to the birds in my yard for almost a year and had become acquainted with finches and woodpeckers and nut hatches and flickers, all new to me, but I still had never seen an oriole. I knew from my bird book that they did live in my area during the summer so I set up an oriole feeder (they like oranges and grape jelly especially) and waited. Within a few days I noticed bright flashes of orange as birds flew by--orioles! But for some reason they were only here for a couple of weeks.

This spring I moved the oriole feeder closer to the house. Orioles are supposed to arrive around May 1, and it was only a few days after that when I saw my first glimpse. I've had my camera at the ready, but the orioles (and the humming birds) have been amazingly elusive--by the time I get the camera on and aimed they are generally gone. Yesterday while I was writing my sermon I kept the camera right beside me and turned on, and I was rewarded with these:





I don't know if it's because of the link to my grandmother, or because they seem more rare, or because of their bright colors, but the orioles make me especially happy.