By Tina Mitchell
Every weekend from mid-March through early August, you’ll find me checking more than 100 nestboxes on our 39 acres in western Fremont County. Remember that scorching, enervating, record-breaking heat of last summer? Yep, I was out there, on foot, each Friday and Saturday afternoon, sweating, plodding – and having a grand time. Why? Monitoring nestboxes affords me glimpses of bird families in the thick of raising their young. If all goes according to plan, for a few weeks each summer two parents spend every minute of daylight protecting their young and delivering protein-rich insect meals to their offspring multiple times an hour. And I get to watch.