Can you believe we found a bird’s nest in our yard??? I was pulling down some vines near the beehive and I saw this lovely bird’s nest just within my reach with some gentile pulling of the branches. It didn’t have any eggs in it and I haven’t seen any birds near that tree on my many trips out to check on the bees, so I’m pretty confident it was safe to remove. It’s hard to tell in the picture, but the inside is perfectly round. I LOVE it!

Here’s a zoomed out shot so you can see it in the context of our nature shelf in the bookcase and to the left on the same shelf is our collection of feathers — the bright blue one and the black-and-white polka dots being our most prized, of course. =)

Here you can see our butterflies and a lovely lacy leaf we found as well as a purple flower that we pressed. I’m thinking I need to put those two items behind glass, but it just hasn’t happened yet.

I need to find out what these two things are called. One is spiny (we found a few at Colonial Williamsburg) and the other is some sort of nut because they have all been cracked open – I think the inside is soo pretty!

Here is our shelf of family read-alouds. We have already finished the entire Little House on the Prairie series and we are almost done with the Little Britches series by Ralph Moody. If you like Little House on the Prairie, you will love Little Britches – such cute books!

Here is our shelf of biographies. I first organized them in alphabetical order by the last name of the subject, but then I organized them into eras (alphabetical within the era). Now, I am thinking of going back to plain alphabetical order. Sad but true that this is exciting to me.

This is my permaculture/homestead/beekeeping/forest garden shelf with a bit of nature study (parent resources) since there’s so much overlap. I relocated our field guides and kids’ nature study books over closer to the nature shelf. I’m too lazy to type all the titles, but if you can’t read a particular title, just leave a comment and I’ll type it for you.