Geez, just when you think they've cleared out! I think Jeremy is ready for Christmas in July, and personally, I can't blame him. :D

I would have LOVED to see that groundhog! Did he waddle off when he saw you?

Brenda

P.S. We care!!!!

Hey Chicka glad you found little Jeremy before he got wrapped up and Christmas decorated! LOL. So now you know why there is so much poopy up there on your chimney, because they doooo come back to sleep and peep :-)
Glad you saw a groundhog they are so funny looking, like a little rolly polly ball but with big teeth and claws.
My baby blues are poking their heads out and looking around today! I have missed them the last few days because you are not supposed to check when they get older because they may jump out to soon. I was sooooo happy to see those sweet little faces that look sooo white?. The last few times i didn't get to see their faces only their little behinds ( which are terribly cute! ) with little stubby tail feathers. You know "if i dont see you ,you cant see me" game they play or the play dead game. I hope they dont get any ideas today because they are only 17 days old but if its not today i KNOW it will be this weekend sometime.
I will be happy and sad like you with the little swifts, happy they made it but sad to see them go. WAAAAAAA ,my babies are leaving me!!!!!!

Like Brenda said WE CARE(((hugs for you and your little swifts)))))~~~~~Bonnie

Hi Brandy. I don't care how many times I see one I am in awe of their sweet little faces. Plus they come all the way from Peru to see us? Mike was joking the other day and said he had left brochures of Camp Nappy Resorts and Recreation Center and Birdy Bed and Breakfast® last time he was in Ecuador. LOL!

Hi Bonnie. I know your happiness and sadness with your baby blues. It is similar to when we hand raise someone and they too must leave and go out on their own. Like Mr. Cardinal. How very sad if we were to keep him just to keep him for ourselves! This way he is outside, has found a lady friend and is free and happy. He is outside on the patio right now with his new girlfriend.

Your baby blues will remember how nice it was in your yard and come back next year to make it even more blue! :-)

The Chuckie? He sat up, looked at me and waddled off under the fence. We had one at Camp Nappy for a while as a patient. I think I posted about him before.

I'll need to upload the latest Swift pics (Jeremy) tonight and maybe add something special for Brandy. LOL! Don't worry ... I think you'll approve.

C3D

Well crap! The pics came out very badly! Here's the least crummy one of the 10th Swift.

{{gwi:171333}}

So far no 11th Swift but we have not been in the basement yet either.

Awwwwwww his little beak is soooo tiny! Don't feel bad about your picture for some reason all my pictures the last two times i took some were all fuzzy. It really made me mad because i had my blue birds in the mealworm pan together and feeding each other, My dogs i was wanting to show everybody and my moms birthday party pictures and my son at an amusement park. So i was very disappointed to. But we can still see your swift and his little sparkly eye and his teeny tiny beak and his shiny feathers so it is still a good pic just a little fuzzy but totally OK :-)~~So you haven't found anybody else? With them roosting at night they may keep coming in till they migrate. When will that be? What about your little chub chub ground hog. Is he still hanging around? We have a lot of skunks right now! They ALL had babies and come to scavenger under the bird feeders all night and it really freaks our dogs out. My mom smokes and goes outside so she is always scared they will spray her. They have gotten so tame they come right up on the porch with her and she gets so scared! I told her if she started foaming at the mouth we knew what happened.
I haven't seen my little bluebirds peeking today they may have took of right away this morning before i got up so i am still looking but watching the trees too. ~~~~~~Bonnie

LOL @ Bonnie's mom foaming at the mouth!! I can't even imagine how cute those little skunklets must be! But yeah, I hope they don't practice on Smokin' Mama. :D

Oh, Jeremy IS precious! They look so fragile!

I've heard that groundhogs are like gigantic gophers, so I would probably get scared poopless if I saw one. LOL Cute from behind, though, I bet. :D

Brenda

No new Swifts. They DO come home to roost though. WOW! What a racket they make ... but sooo nice to hear. The top of the larger chimney looks very poopy. I can just imagine what the inside looks like. I believe they will leave us for their Amazon home in September like the Hummers.

The little swifts don't weigh anything even chubby Jeremy. They are so very special. Although we have had to change things around here to try to ensure their safety we will miss them when they leave.

The groundhogs are very sweet too! The one we had *loved* to have a bath and getting dried with a towel was THE BEST part. Oh my ... how he stretched his arms and legs out and closed his eyes as he got a chuckie massage with the drying! LOL!

Hope that Mama Bonnie is not foaming today. LOL! We had a skunk family living here many years ago. There were four mini skunks. My Mom would get vanilla wafers, cherries and grapes and offer the little skunks these as treats. They soon would come to greet her when they saw her. After a week or so my Mom realized this may not be a good thing to have a herd of skunks in the yard, especially since we had three dogs at the time.

Hi Brenda! So far moma's not foaming and i think they are winning her over. I keep hearing her talking to someone out there and i hope its the skunks and not herself. I also saw her sneak out a piece of bread last night. So first she's scared of them , then she's talking to them, and now i think she's feeding them. I hope she doesn't decide to let them in, because i would get OUT!! :-) They are REALLY cute, so i can understand their persuasive effects on her but she better watch out and not sneeze or anything!
Chicka did you have a young groundhog? I would be scared of an older one they have BIG teeth!! The picture of him being all wiggly in the towel is really cute. They have BIG teeth!! :-)
Well you have a while to enjoy your swifts then before Sept. but all that poopy is building up so you are going to need a BIG FIRE to burn it off when they go though!! HaHa ROFL Just kidding. I know how much you love your baby swifts poopy and all :-)
Did you notice i used ROFL and actually knew what it meant. Thanks Chicka your great! TTYL~~~~~~Bonnie

Our Year of the Swifts. So far NO sign of an eleventh visitor. Well not inside the house.

I was at the end of the back garden (150 ft. from the house) and heard a ruckus. I looked toward the house and saw the twittering Swifts coming from the chimney!

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six, seven, eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. FOURTEEN! Oh...wait ... fifteen .... ooooo .... sixteen!
I counted sixteen Swifts coming from our larger chimney. I may have missed the first dozen before I looked up.

I *know* there are not that many chicks in a nest. I wonder if we have a little swift community / nursery school set up in the chimney? I also *know* the top of the chimney looks very poopy. I bet the inside looks even better.

When I was a thousand years younger, a starling was trapped in the smaller chimney. My father thought the bird had somehow gotten between the walls so he cut holes in the bathroom wall, the master bedroom closet and the closet in another bedroom. No starling but we could still hear him. My parents phoned someone who needed to make a larger opening in the chimney so he could reach in and rescue the starling.

I must be a product of my genetics. LOL!

Our Chuckie was a young adult who had been hit by a car. Someone brought him in to the hospital where I worked at the time and handed the wild unconscious groundhog to the receptionist. I gave him oxygen and medication to treat for concussion and shock. The radiographs we took showed no fractures.

He regained consciousness but was obviously confused. He was also paralyzed in his back legs and tail. After a few days in the hospital I brought him home and we made accommodations for him on the breezeway. That lasted about two days because his urine had a very strong scent! (~Gag me~) We had mosquito netting so we made a camp site for him under the olive tree with lots of pine shavings, a huge wooden apple crate to serve as a shelter / den and a lot of food.

He had his bath with flea shampoo and loved the massage but loved the drying more! Over the following days and weeks he regained the use of his tail and then his legs as his medications were continue to improve his chances for recovery. He loved Banana Nut Crunch cereal, strawberries, apples, dandelion flowers, vanilla wafers and bananas. He'd eat the banana lengthwise and peel it himself! Sadly he remained a little scrambled and would circle rather than walk a straight line.

His balance mechanism was injured and although it improved he was not 100% back to normal. I was at a seminar for continuing education for the veterinary medicine and asked a few of the speakers if Chuckie should be allowed to hibernate. They all agreed his best chance for further recovery would be to hibernate and allow his brain to heal. He never woke up from his hibernation. :-(

He was the nicest Chuckie we ever met!

Awwww, Chuckie!! What a precious little guy! I, too, can picture the towel rub-down, and how cuddly he must have looked stretching out and sighing. LOL

I saw a show about wombats the other day, and I can imagine they would be fun to wrap a towel around, too. Delicious! :D

I've only seen skunk babies on TV, but oh, YEAH, were they cute! I can't even imagine what it would be like, having them waddle up to you for some snacks! You ladies are making me drool with your stories!! LOL

Well, except for the poopy chimney part. GREAT to have swifts, but I wonder how big the explosion will be when the stuff ignites during the first fire of the season. LOL Just kidding, of course, I don't THINK it's flammable. :D

Brenda

Look out Brenda! Chicka's Gonna blow!!!!! BOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMM

Chickadee? Chickadee? You all right????

Hi Chicka, Did you have any more little jet visitors yet?
Is your birthday coming up soon? I thought i read somewhere you were a Leo/Dog but i cant find it again. It was the discussion of Chinese Zodiac signs i think. Am i losing my mind? Your member page says Jan. 1st. Just curious and wanting to say Happy Birthday at the right time :-)~~~To she who has lots of puppy pee! HeHeHe, Bonnie

No new swifty guests inside. We can hear them from time to time in the chimney. They seem to come in periodically to rest. After the Swifts have left we'll have the chimney guy come and see about doing a cleaning of the inside plus the ever important screening off of the entrance to the duct system.

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm. We don't use the fireplace until winter. :-)

Birthday? Me? Don't have one Bonnie. :-) There was a re-do of GW a few years ago and everyone had their BD set at Jan. 1st.

LOL! You bring back memories of birds in our chimneys, which were not cause for laughter when it happened. We used to have a furnace built into the fireplace and it was a shock in the spring when it was too early to close the vent for warm weather to find the swifts flying down the chimney. They would zoom around the inside of the fireplace and then into the living room trailing ash and cinders behind them. The cats would become hysterical and nothing was safe from a collision. Fabrics were shredded as perches were found and deserted when the cats corrected course. White walls showed the imprints of sooty, spread wings and picture frames were knocked cockeyed when not dumped on the floor. Sets of sliding glass doors were opened to facilitate an exit but the glass was hit more often than an opening. I swear the birds thought it was a game because the mayhem would continue until the cats could no longer give chase. Exits were easy to find then. A screen placed over the chimney was jarred off twice and we had to hire a chimney sweep to remove the nests that fall so we could heat the house with out setting it on fire. Sandy

LOL Sandy! I can really picture the mayhem! :)

Awww Sandy. That's something you would never forget, ehh? LOL! What a mess! The first few Swifts we had made a mess by knocking over the orchids and other plants onto the carpeting and couch. *YIKES!*

It has been a Swifty day at Camp Nappy today. First there was Kizzy. She was in the basement on some shelves over the workbench. When I saw her I told her:

Hi! We've been waiting for you sweetheart!

OMG! She was soooo very petite! I asked her if I could photograph her but she did not reply.

She was very calm in my hand but once I put her on the curtains for a photograph she flew away! I asked her for a photograph(s) and she *reluctantly* agreed but was not very patient. She's young and has much better things to do with her time than sit around being admired!

She got a kiss (or three) and flew off to join her family. She was our 11th Swift guest so far since mid May.

Ooooooooo...... You can see her tiny toes! :-) She was very impatient and was ready to fly! LOL!

{{gwi:171334}}

Then about two hours later Baby Swift Larry came for cuddles and a kiss too. He was at the window above the washing machine. He is by far the *pudgiest* Swift we have met.

{{gwi:171336}}

Again, very calm in the hand but like his sibling had a lot to do and would rather have not posed for photographs. Little Larry got a cuddle as I admired his roundness and asked him to be very careful on his journey to Peru and to please come back for a cuddle next year.

He was sooo alert! He's the only swift guest so far that moved his head and he looked as though he was really listening to what I said. He looked me straight in the eye!!! Honestly, I did not fall off the washing machine and hit my head! LOL!

Can Swift #13 be far behind? Wonder who we'll name him after? Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm!

C3D and a bunch o' Swifts

Awww, what little darlings! I LOVE Larry! I have a thing for pudgy bits. LOL And the looking in the eye thing is precious!

Thirteen will be MOST serendipitous, to be sure! :D

Brenda

Awwwww You got more little jets!!! They are so sleek and shiny. I will never be able to get over their WINGS. They are sooooo long. I love them all too but there is just something about your Larry. What a gorgeous darling! So nice to sit and make such a sweet picture for us to drool over. How very kind of him to listen to you sometimes its hard to get men to listen :-)~~~~~Bonnie

12!!!!!! I think the last time I checked in you were at 7! So if they ALL return next year to brood and each one has 12 adorable babies, next year you could have 144 swift visitors! And a very poopy chimney!

"Marco? Is that you?" I asked as I heard a familiar fluttering in the basement.

Yep. There he was at the window above the washing machine Swift Guest # 13! :-) So ... up I climb on top of the washer and get the sleek, petite and oh so adorable little Chimney Swift. Who could not love this little face? (Sorry it is out of focus but I think the beauty of this little fellow radiates through.) {{gwi:171338}}

Little Marco got a kiss on top of his head as I wished him a safe journey to the Amazon and off he flew to tell his friends of his adventures. SIGH

Once again I got to hold someone very special. :-)

C with 3Ds and 13 swifts!

Lucky 13, Mr. Marco! What beautiful eyes! I bet he's telling his buddies, "I got to be held by her! I saw her! The Swift Fairy really IS real, guys!" :)

Brenda

SIGH!

Yep. More and more Swifts. :-)

Monday we had these two drop in for a visit ... These are the 14th and 15th Chimney Swifts this year.

{{gwi:171341}}

Then today about an hour after we got home from our vacation this guy greeted us. Nick! How nice you waited for us to come home so we could personally meet you. :-)

{{gwi:171384}}

It is just *so* amazing to hold these guys!

Repeat offenders wanting another kiss from Snow White ;-) Where else are they going to get cuddled and kissed so much? Just look at how cozy they look all snuggled in the hand. Bonnie

Nick is a real charmer, with those big, dark eyes! Kisses for Nick!

Brenda

Little Nick is gone. I *think* all the Swifts have left. The chimney is very quiet. But the twittering of the Chimney Swifts will still be in the house. Kramer and the cockateils have learned the Swift song and repeat it very well! LOL! :-)

Yesterday I went to let the doggies back inside and saw a female House Sparrow in the breezeway. "Ah Sweetheart. How did you get in here?"

The squirrels had chewed a hole in one of the screens to get to the seeds and she must have wriggled her way in too. For a while she was sitting next to Bub, the Grackle. She was so frightened I didn't try to catch her because I didn't want her to get hurt. I took one quicky photograph of her then opened the doors. She flew the length of the breezeway turned and flew back out the door.

LOL! Just what kinda house is this? Wild birds don't normally enter a house do they? Maybe I should ask Mike to turn off the huge VACANCY sign out front?

C3D

I've had one or 2 birds (I think house sparrows) somehow get in our house from the "garage" (enclosed metal "room" off the kitchen) in the 12 years we've lived here. So no, it's definitely abby-normal!

Glad to hear the little wayward sparrow made it out safe and sound! At least they know which house is the safest to break into! :D

Brenda

LOL! Camp Nappy Resorts and Recreation Center Birdy Bed and Breakfast® is a secured facility. Uh huh! So secure even a sparrow can break in! :-)