My little group of white-throated sparrows departed about 30 minutes before dark Thursday evening. I watched them go. They worked their way up in a pecan tree and spent 20 minutes or so chasing and fiddling around in a tangle of broken branches then worked up near the top and headed up into the north and climbing. A large group of goldfinches arrived last week end and stayed through Tuesday. Some left gradually and the last birds left Friday night. For a bit I had more goldfinches than at any time during the winter. Yellow males left before the plainer marked birds. Several blue-gray gnatcatchers arrived at the same time as the goldfinches joining my single bad-plumaged bird. They fed on some sort of small flying insect among the pollen anthers on pecans. They all left on Friday night too. Chuck-wills widow calling this morning at 3:50. The red-tailed hawks are sitting on the nest and very inconspicuous. Only see a low flying bird headed on a direct flight in the direction of the nest. Removal of dead trees from a nearby yard did not cause them to leave. The 3 pairs of titmice are at the nest as are the chickadees. Something may have happened at one chickadee nest as one bird of a pair was begging from the other. Jays and cardinals also sitting. This was the first winter I had a flock of cardinals versus numbers of paired cardinals. The last birds in the flock are having much difficulty with understanding the concept of territories as they try to feed. Again this year there have been no inchworms in the oak trees and apparently none in the pecans that I have seen. I did have the first spiders on my balcony last week since last summer. But a good thing is that there are no mosquitoes around either and the wasps that normally hunt spiders are totally absent although there were still good numbers around into last fall. Some of the pecan trees that lost all their leaves last year and apparently died did not die. They are greening up in inverse order of losing their leaves. However, the largest (and first shedding) still appears dead and other large branches have died back after starting to green. So there may be more losses as it gets hotter and the trees need to move more water through damaged channels. -- Joseph C. Kennedy on Buffalo Bayou in West Houston Josephkennedy36@xxxxxxxxx TEXBIRDS help file and Texas birding links at: http://moonmountaingroup.com/texbirds Edit your Freelists account settings for TEXBIRDS at //www.freelists.org/list/texbirds