"I used to be nosy, but then I lost my sense of smell." (-Unknown)

If you've been reading my blog at all, you know that Joe and I do love our birds.

We watch them with fascination every chance we get. We see almost 30 different varieties of birds on a given day.

However, if you were here to see our deck, that would be no surprise to you whatsoever. We live in a quiet little spot with lots of trees and bushes, and we have our garden, brimming over with flowers. There are also 2 ponds, a bluebird house, and lots of perches and posts on our deck that make birds happy as clams. I'm sure they see it as an invitation, on a silver platter, to come join us.

What we call our Golden Corral buffet of feeders sits perched right outside the french doors where we eat our meals, like a veritable Babette's Feast for the little guys--and so we'll very often sit and watch them, close by, and comment to each other on their hilarious behaviors. All lined up in a row, we have: a thistle feeder, a suet feeder, our "big" feeder (like the one I sketched) with sunflower and other seeds in it, a feeder filled exclusively with peanuts, and finally, hummingbird nectar in a feeder for those little guys.

When I sat to sketch this little finch, I had to smile, because what made him an attractive "subject" to sketch in the first place was the way he was veering around as if he was a nosy neighbor, trying to peek in and figure out exactly what we were up to on our side of the glass window.

"The best mirror is an old friend." (-Peter Nivio Zarlenga)