Say's who?

It's a Say's Phoebe!

I told S at the beginning of the summer that he could pick one thing and we'd study it together over the summer. I was hoping for geography, or maybe, since we live surrounded by brown hills, and everyone in town in supported by the coal mining industry, geology. Nope. Birds. He picked birds.

Okay, I'm a can-do type mom, right? Not my choice, but we can do that, I thought. There were two different kinds of birds nesting in our yard, we'll just identify those and then observe and learn. Hah. Two different kinds of mid-sized brown birds. We watched them day in and day out, we had the bird watchers book on our table for weeks. We'd look at it daily. The birds laid eggs. We looked at the book. The eggs hatched. We looked at the book. We got a new book. The chicks started to fly. We looked at the book. I was starting to feel rather desperate, when I realized that they were no longer returning to the nest. Were they going to take off and leave us stranded? All that time and no identification? a summer's study unhatched and unfulfilled?

And then last Thursday morning, I FOUND IT! It's a Say's Phoebe. I was elated. A friendship cemented by a name. "S!" I exclaimed, "come! look! behold!" I gestured, I may have jumped up and down. "Cool." he said, and he went back to his Legos.

But I am a woman captivated. I took the book when we went camping, we identified two more birds. I kept stopping the car on last weeks youth group trip, making the teenagers LOOK AT THE BIRDS! Maybe he'll choose birds again next year?
Yeah, I only identified one of the birds nesting in the yard.