Where were these cool toys when I was a kid?!?!?

Have you seen the motion sensitive birds that chirp and wiggle with their actual bird call. These are the coolest things ever to me. Initially I was impressed by the quality (for plastic) and accuracy these guys have. The company that makes them did all the crowd pleasing birds like cardinals, bluebirds and goldfinches but they even have yellow warblers and scarlet tanagers (pictured left) and today I just got a shipment of common yellowthroats (didn't have time to get a photo). A common yellow throat, can you imagine?! I love walking by it and pishing and listening to it go "whichity whichity whichity" back at me. There are eight different birds and since they are all motion sensitive my inner child often gets the best of me. One day I had a bunch of them on the counter facing each other in a circle. I set one off and then the movement of each started them all chirping continuously. Melissa, my assistant manager walked in on this scene, looked at me, shook her head and slowly backed away. If it's a really slow day I'll walk around with the goldfinch on my hand and its almost as if it's gossiping with me. If you haven't seen these things yet, stop in my store and have some fun. I think I'm going to hide the warblers in my apartment this winter and when it's too bad to go birding outside (what am I saying, it's never too bad to go birding) and use them as reminders of spring warbler watching. I wonder if they will ever come out with hawks...that's just too much for me to think about right now.

I need to bring Cinnamon back to the store soon so I'm not talking to mechanical birds between customers. Speaking of which, I think she will be able to come to the store on Saturday. She will be so happy. She keeps following me all over the apartment where ever I go with this sad little look and I keep tripping over the little bunny butthead. Her cut doesn't look so scary so small children shouldn't be too freaked out by her still healing wound.

I had so much fun on Open Source last night and discovered that there are quite a few truck drivers who are birders. It seems a natural transition, you're out on the road so you can't help but notice the hawks, the flycatchers, the little songbirds are rest stops. Very cool.