Our Babies Have Grown Up

Got all misty-eyed yesterday because the babies have left the nest and are acting all grown-up. Not our kids; I mean the couple of young Mississippi Kites that recently fledged from a nest across the road from our house. Yesterday, for the first time, I saw them really testing their wings, soaring, swooping, and doing some aerial acrobatics. The parents were also flying around, and at one point I watched one go into a very steep dive, crashing into the middle branches of one of the trees in our front yard. Didn't see if it caught whatever it was after. Here's a photo of one of the adult birds circling our yard:

A couple of times I've seen kites catch cicadas on the wing. Cicadas are big noisy bugs, and when caught they do a lot of loud frantic buzzing. Yesterday I heard a cicada in its death throes, and followed the sound to a live oak where I found a Blue Jay busy pulling the wings off of one.

Other birds seen around our yard yesterday included Wood Duck, Green Heron, Broad-winged Hawk, a juvenile Eastern Bluebird, Blue-gray Gnatcatcher, and Summer Tanager. Not bad for a staggeringly hot summer day.