Backyard Flying Feathers

About the Book

This book is about the many birds that visit my backyard year around. I have taken my skills in photography to capture remakable, colorful birds in their everyday habit and to share with you, the readers of this book, pictures and information about birds that may have visited your backyard. At any time of year, you can look around in your backyard and a colorful little bird will catch your eye. After watching the birds in my backyard for a few months, I decided to intentionally attract them to the backyard more often. I went to the local library and begin a research on birds. I discovered that children and adults are fascinated by birds and that millions of people in the United States paticpate in feeding wild birds. This trend is rapidly growing today. In my research I found that birds require four basic things to surive in the wild: food, water, protection from danger, and a place to raise their young safety. In nature birds fulfill these needs in a variety of ways. Birds choose their menu from the wide variety of resources that nature provides. Foods they eat in clude insects, spiders, grubs and worms, nuts and seeds, soft fruits and berries, tree sap, flower nectar, the tender young leaves and buds of grass trees, and shrubs. Birds can be resourceful in finding water: a birdbaths, rain puddles, garden hoses and streams. Birds protect their young from cats and squirrels by building nesting holes in tree trunks. They build a nest in the crotch of tree limbs or shrub branches with sticks an twigs, grass, leaves and strips of bark, string, yarn and tissue. Birds have been around at least 140 million years. 8,650 speciesof birds have been identfied in the world today.

About the Author

My name is Marietta R. Cunningham born and raised in Baltimore Maryland, I have been a resident in Cincinnati Ohio for thirty years. I am the mother of five and married to James my husband and partner. I worked for many years as a mental health hospital counselor and photography has been my hobby since childhood. During my childhood I would carry my camera to school in my bookbag and I would take pictures at lunchtime. As an adult I would carry my camera to work and photograph spring flowers around the work place. After retirement my husband and I would take a vacation every year of places I wanted to photograph. Fifteen years ago James and I planted flowers in our backyard and birds and butterflies began to visit the flowers. I became interested in how they survived year round in all types of weather! I decided to be my own teacher. I began to do research on birds, with the help of my husband we literally turned our backyard into a bird's paradise.