Lisa's Oriole

There is this truth about any hobby which seems to be that you start out small, with one thing maybe, and then it progresses to MORE...BIGGER...BETTER. I've seen this with my father's collecting hobby (coins, jugs, pens, to name a few) but I think it applies to a spectrum that includes camping (from simple tent to a block long 5th wheel) scrapbooking (cropping some pictures to creating a 3D pop-up page) and even things like knitting or racing cars. Has this ever happened to you? I just realized that it applies to birdwatching. We started out just noticing whatever flew by in our yard, or landed in the lake, but then once we put up the birdfeeder it turned into changing the kind of seeds to attract different birds, and getting special feeders for each type. A neighbor that lives a few houses down the street from us once mentioned that she would put out oranges to attract Orioles. At the time I didn't know what an oriole was but now I wanted one. So we put out oranges and eventually even bought an official oriole feeder. I didn't use to have time to take care of things and ants would take over but this year I've been able to keep up with it and we have a pair of beautiful Baltimore Orioles that I think are nesting near our yard. I feel a little guilty if all I did was lure them over from Lisa's yard but these are NICE birds. They are so pretty to look at and their song is bright and musical. Enough never being enough we tried putting oranges right outside our doorwall on the deck and sure enough they now come right up so I could get these pictures.

I am, however, not the only one watching the birds: