Birds and tadpoles

Since the last post, we've had many seasonal "firsts." The first catbird returned two days ago, and the first wren yesterday. The catbird is one of my favorites because of his beautiful gray color, his sleek silhouette, and his beautiful singing (when he's imitating a bird that sings beautifully anyway). I also enjoy the scurrying of the house wrens. They're sometimes justifiably nicknamed "mouse wrens" because when you see them out of the corner of your eye scurrying on the ground, they can easily be mistaken for a mouse. Too bad they have the annoying habit of taking over other bird's nests by putting what we call "wren sticks" on top of existing nests. (The photo shows the wren with some of the nest materials he's been removing from the existing nest. Fortunately, it's just a house sparrow's nest.) Our toad tadpoles are developing well, though somewhat more slowly than we expected, probably because of the cold weather. For the last few years, they've reached this point in their development and then disappeared. We're trying to increase the odds of repeating the success we had the first few years by raising at least some of them in an aquarium, safe from predators. We suspect that our green frogs might have been the culprit, since the toad failures started about the same time we acquired green frogs. Our frogs haven't survived the past few winters, so weren't currently frogless - a real disappointment since we enjoyed them so much in the past.