Bennington Lake on Tuesday

The summer birds are very busy now at the lake.  One of the female orioles has decided that tinsel from the Christmas tree pile makes for very festive nest building material.  Yellow-breasted chats, western wood peewees, Bullock's orioles, yellow warblers, house wrens and eastern kingbirds were the most active and vocal birds on our walk.  Two osprey are still fishing the lake, but where are they nesting?  The concrete structure in the lake is jammed with cliff swallow nests and the northern rough-winged swallows are busy in the parking lot bank.  Tree swallows are using the nest boxes we put up a few years ago.  Gray catbirds twitter from the scrubs and one finally popped up so we could see it.  We saw a total of 42 species.