Bird Watch: Nest and dust bath & Post no. 300

Finally I was able to log my Pigeon Watch site on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology Celebrate Urban Birds website. You can see my site on the map below.

I have not made any systematic observations at my birdwatch since June but there seem to be many more pigeons at the site. At home, the hummingbirds were back for a week or two. In other bird news, I found a nest in the quince tree outside my living room window and a dust bath in the front garden.

About the dust bath Leon Augustus Hausman writes,

One piece of apparatus, frequently overlooked when one is equipping a bird-attracting station, is the dust bath. This is almost as necessary as a water bath....Birds take dust baths to help rid themselves of skin parasites, particularly the so-called bird lice.

Hausman recommends a tray of dry road dust. My dust bath is very informal. It's a mix of garden and bagged soil that I left unplanted in the garden. Note the bowl shape as well as the mounds of soil in the photograph above.

Lastly, this is the 300th post on the local ecology blog - local ecologist. Thank you to our readers and commentators.