Haven’t made many updates about the Defective Wildlife lately, since A) we’ve been out of town so much, and more importantly B) it’s nearly a hundred degrees and so humid that you feel like you’re living in Earth’s Armpit, and nobody, including the little birds and lumpy squirrels, feel much like cavorting. I occasionally see a squirrel splayed out on the railing, limbs draped over the sides, looking like a very small bearskin rug, but that’s about it.

There IS a regular line at the birdbath, despite it being the wrong shape and full of skanky water. It’s just that hot. I guiltily dumped out the mosquito-larvae habitat and refilled it, but of course the birds LIKED the skanky water, thank you, and that clean stuff out of the tap is just too weird for ’em. Ingrates.

Anyway, I think Scruffles the bald titmouse bred. Whether his baldness is genetic, or he passed on a raft of little parasites to his nestlings, there are now a half-dozen bald titmice. Scruffles got some feathers back, although he still looks distinctly bedraggled, and the others are in various stages of bird-pattern baldness. It took a bit to identify, since any bird emerging from a birdbath automatically looks somewhat mussed, but there’s definitely a few baldies scattered among the glossy, neat-feathered titmice that dominate the birdbath. (Occasionally, after they’ve all left, a Carolina chickadee will sneak in and have a good wriggle and flap through the puddle, but it’s mostly titmice.)

Once the weather cools down a bit, I anticipate more Defective Wildlife, and when the fall migration hits, I’ll take up birding again. I’m looking forward to it.

Now if only my head would bake…