We have seen so many Baltimore Orioles at our jelly feeder the past couple of weeks, I keep thinking that they must be filling up for their migration. I’ve never seen so many… sometimes there’s a line of 7 or 8 waiting for the feeder. And it is quite amazing that they patiently wait for their turn.
We look forward to their return each spring. They are such a beautiful bird and so chatty and colorful. We will miss them when they finally leave in the next couple of weeks.
“The Oriole nest is an engineering masterpiece. They weave a hanging-basket nest with plant fibers, grasses, vine and tree bark and sometimes string or yarn placed out on the small twigs of a branch 6-45 feet in the air. This keeps them safe from most predators.
“It takes as many as 12 days for an Oriole to weave its nest. One Baltimore Oriole was observed spending 40 hours building a nest with about 10,000 stitches and the tying of thousands of knots, all with its beak…
“While modern day Oriole nests are made primarily of plant fibers, Oriole nests collected in the late 1800s, before the age of the automobile, were made almost exclusively of horsehair.”
https://valparaiso.wbu.com/oriole-fun-facts