And They're Off!

Madeline went outside this morning and discovered that the baby birds had left their nest.  Well, most of them had left the nest.  Of the four,  one was still in the nest, two had made it to the neighbor's yard, and one was still hiding in the grass in our yard.  Of course, Madeline promptly located the one still in our yard and chased it into a hiding spot against our garden wall.  Eventually she figured out how to get it into a container.  The girls watched it for a while and then we convinced them to let it go, which was not an easy task because Hailey wanted to keep it as a pet. Madeline and Isabella wanted to construct a habitat for it and keep it as well.   They did all finally said good-bye and we placed it outside our fence so that none of the girls could attempt to pick it up again.  Since this is in fact the second year in a row that we have had an issue with baby birds being found in our yard as they are leaving the nest, I think I will be sure that next spring we learn a bit about the process, so that the girls know in advance not to touch or chase and to just watch.

Baby bird, hiding against our wall.

Hailey getting a closer look.

Saying "good-bye."

Animal Tracks

We had some snow accumulation last night, so we decided to go out and play and explore in our backyard.  We found some squirrel tracks on our play structure on the ramp and on the beams. It was interesting to see where the squirrel went and count his toes.    

This is a close-up of the prints we found.

Here are some prints on the beam of our monkey bars.

Isabella compared them to her own hand.

We also checked out the inside of our bird house.  Most times we check we can see evidence of more than one type of nest built on top of each other.  This time it looked like just one nest, although we found feathers from different types of birds inside.
Isabella drew this paw print in her nature journal.

This is Madeline's drawing of the squirrel prints in the nature journal.