The other evening I was walking by this birdhouse and saw a downy woodpecker poking its head out of the hole. It is the second time I've seen a downy woodpecker around this birdhouse in the evening so I guess it is one of their regular roosting holes. I always think of birdhouses as places for nesting in the summer and forget some birds also need places to shelter at other times of the year. This is a daytime picture from earlier in the year of course, as it was too dark to get a good picture.
A few weeks ago the mower took a swath out of the 2010 bush are. I don't know what the mower was thinking, perhaps he remembered an old path that went aproximately that way but that path hasn't been mowed in five years and was thoroughly filled in by the sumac. There were a few elderberry and nannyberry bushes planted there that were struggling amongst the sumac, perhaps they will come back stronger.
