Since we moved to our new home (in northern Illinois) we've been trying to attract birds to our backyard. The first few weeks we didn't see a single bird at our feeders. The first bird to visit was an American Goldfinch at the end of February. In the last 3 months we've seen 19 different species in our backyard. We now have eight feeders and a bird bath and it's busy every day. It's so much fun to sit outside and watch the birds. My favorite backyard birds are the Baltimore Orioles. We have some oranges out for them on our fence.

Male Baltimore Oriole

Here are some pictures of our backyard birds. Most of these pictures were made with our Wingscapes Birdcam:

House Finches

Common Grackle

Female Baltimore Oriole

Black-capped Chickadee

Northern Cardinal

Song Sparrow

Dark-eyed Junco

American Goldfinch

Northern Flicker

What is your favorite backyard bird?

This week's highlighted t-shirt is our I Love Tits design for anyone who loves our cute Birdorable tits, which are shown in parentheses below: a Tufted Titmouse, a Boreal Chickadee and a Black-capped Chickadee on this design show that the tits you love are cute little birds. What else were you thinking?

For more funny tees check out our Funny Designs section.

Here's another Birdorable coloring page. This time it's the Birdorable Keel-billed Toucan. Click the following link to download a PDF and print the page for some cute bird coloring fun:

• Birdorable Keel-billed Toucan Coloring page (PDF)

(if you cannot open these PDF files you'll need to install Adobe Reader) To see the actual colors of this bird visit the Birdorable Keel-billed Toucan page.

Subscribe to the Birdorable Blog by RSS feed or by email to get notified of new Birdorable coloring pages. You can check out our other coloring pages here.

Here are ten fun facts about the Snowy Owl. Don't forget to check out our customizable Snowy Owl t-shirts and gifts and other cute Birdorable owls.

1. Snowy Owls are diurnal, which means that unlike most other owls they are active and hunt during the day and night.
2. The diet of Snowy Owls consists mainly of lemmings. They are known to sit and wait for their prey and spend most of their time perched still and silent on prominent lookouts.
3. Lemming populations are cyclic and in years when lemming populations are down Snowy Owls often leave the arctic regions and fly south in search of food. Because of this, about once every four years Snowy Owls are found as far south as the northern and central United States.
4. An adult Snowy Owl can eat three to five lemmings per day, or up to 1,600 per year.
5. The feathers of Snowy Owls have no pigment, leaving more space for air which helps them to keep warmer because air is such a good insulator.
6. Their legs and toes are heavily feathered to protect them from the harsh weather in cold arctic regions.
7. Snowy Owls often hang out at airports, perhaps because the wide open spaces remind them of the tundra.
8. Although Snowy Owls have few predators, they still have to be watchful of arctic foxes, wolves and other animals during the nesting season. Males defend the nest by standing guard nearby while the female incubates the eggs and broods the young. When a predator approaches both parents will dive-bomb (even wolves!) and try to distract them away from the nest.
9. The Snowy Owl is also known as the Arctic Owl or Great White Owl. A group of owls has many different names, including a bazaar, glaring, parliament, stooping and a wisdom of owls.
10. The breeding range of the Snowy Owl is circumpolar, ranging across the northern regions of Greenland, Scandinavia, Russia, Alaskia and Canada.

We've added another parrot to our Birdorable family of cute birds. This time it's the Yellow-bibbed Lorikeet, a beautifully colored parrot from Southeast Asia where it lives in subtropical and tropical lowland forests.

Photo by Yee Chieng

If you like our cute Yellow-bibbed Lory don't forget to check out our other parrots and parakeets.

This week's highlighted t-shirt is our Know Your Terns! design featuring nine different Birdorable terns: Caspian Tern; Royal Tern; Sandwich Tern; Common Tern; Arctic Tern; Least Tern; Gull-billed Tern; Black Tern; and Sooty Tern Do you know them all?

We've added our fifth Birdorable kingfisher and one of my favorite birds: the Pied Kingfisher. This cute black-and-white bird can be found from sub-Saharan Africa to India and China. It is an excellent hunter, skilled at hovering over the water and diving down to catch its prey. It has learned to eat in flight and hunt in both salt and freshwater, allowing the bird to hunt over sea or other places without perches, something that other kingfishers cannot do.

Photo by tj.haslam

We've seen these birds a few times on vacation and I loved watching them hover and diving down. They are quite abundant (the most common kingfisher throughout their range) and very approachable, allowing even us to take nice pictures. ;)

We saw this above one in The Gambia. Isn't it beautiful?

If you like this cutie you may also like our other Birdorable kingfishers.

The Birdorable Guest Blogging Contest over at Birdchick's Blog has ended. Ten people have written guest posts on Birdchick's Blog and it is now time to vote for your favorite entry. You can view all 10 entries here. They are all excellent posts and definitely worth a read. When you’re done, simply pick your favorite from the drop-down list on this page before Friday, May 22nd at 5pm CST. Each of the ten entries has already won a Birdorable Tough Titmice Magnet and the grand prize winner will also get a Birdorable t-shirt!

We've been getting more and more birds at our backyard feeders since we moved here in February. Yesterday morning we were delighted to see our first Baltimore Oriole!! He was hanging around all day and he's back today singing his heart out in our backyard. He's probably trying to find a mate to show off our awesome grape jelly that he found. ;) Unfortunately I haven't had a chance to get a good picture of this beautiful bird at our feeder, but it looks something like this:

In honor of our new backyard bird, this week's highlighted t-shirt design is our cute Birdorable Baltimore Oriole. These small blackbirds live across the eastern part of North America and they love it if you put out some grape jelly and oranges for them! Males are beautifully colored with orange underparts and shoulders with black over the rest of the body. This is our totally cute Birdorable Baltimore Oriole: