Our purple martins

It's been fun watching the activity at the purple martin house.

 The babies have been hungry.

It is soon time for migration to Brazil.

These little fledglings need to learn to fly!

One of them made the flight across the yard to my red bud tree!

 It kept trying out it's wings, but not taking off.

 An adult kept swooping by, encouraging it to follow, I'm guessing. (the fuzzy blur on the left is the bird flying)  And finally it took off.

This morning there these fledglings were again.  Watching the adults fly around.
And a lone sparrow too.  You can tell there are sparrow nests on the right by the straw inside the holes.  Al tried and tried to keep them away, and we were happy to have only 2 of the12 apartments taken up by sparrows.  We read many different ways to keep them away, and we tried some of these, but sparrows are persistent little birds!

They were all so very busy this morning and then they all flew off - all but this one