Summer officially arrives Friday night, but for all practical purposes, it's been here for a while. As soon as the trees get their leaves, the weather warms up and school lets out, it's summertime.

The pace of life seems to slow and most folks are more relaxed. People get to spend more time outdoors and that makes everything better as well. June can be a glorious month.

At our house, we generally have some type of wildlife babies nesting in all sorts of interesting places. We've had baby birds in the hanging basket on the front porch, and a nest of bunnies in the strawberry patch.

There's a bush near one of our window wells, and about seven years ago after a thunderstorm, my daughters reported hearing cats meow. We have several cats, and all were accounted for -- none trapped in any closets. So the mystery deepened. The girls kept hearing cats, but none could be seen. I finally told them to let me know when they heard the sound again, and I would look.

Sure enough, I looked up, opened the window well and saw a mass of squirming kittens. Calico, black, yellow, red -- all huddled together, awaiting the return of their calico mother.

Being the softies that we are, we left a bowl of food and water in the window well, and sure enough, momma returned home. My daughters became attached to the kittens, and the mother cat was so tame, I knew it had to belong to someone.

I made up posters and placed an ad in the Sentinel, and within a week we found the owner, who was grateful to get her cat (and kittens) back.

We did not need seven more cats.

I thought that would be a once in a lifetime happening, but this year we had something new. In the same window well, a robin made a nest.

This was a first for me to witness. Before the area north of our home was developed, it was an alfalfa field and we had killdeers nesting in the alfalfa. Killdeer are small brown birds that resemble bluejays, and make their nests on the ground. If you approach their nest, the mother will make a racket and hop away, faking a broken wing. The mother offers herself as a distraction to save her young.

Before we fenced in our back yard, I used to walk our dogs in the field north of our home and inadvertently flushed out several killdear, which startled my dogs as much as it did the mother bird.

We wouldn't have learned about the nest in the window well if it hadn't been for one of the more immature young robins. One of the robins, unsure of his flying abilities, had left the nest and returned to the wrong window well. The fluttering and chirping and worried frequent flights overhead by his mother told us that something was wrong.

I went outside and was able to get the young whippersnapper out of his predicament, cursing his stupidity for flying into a hole in the ground. What kind of crazy bird flies into a hole?

A couple of weeks later, we heard chirping coming from the other window well, and, sure enough, here was the Einstein I had helped out of the other hole. But he had company. After some dive bombing by momma robin, I realized why: she had nested in the window well. After making this discovery, we decided to let everything stay where it was. I think they have grown up and gone away now.

Last year, I had a young robin fly into my garage. I caught him twice and released him, only to have him fly back in and get caught in the soffits of the garage. I peeled back part of the soffit and hoped for the best. After several days, we no longer heard the scurrying of the bird, so he either found his way out, or I have a desiccated bird corpse in my garage.

Like I said, June can be a glorious month of wonder.

As always, I welcome your comments. You can reach me by email at tstangl@lemarscomm.net, telephone 712-546-7031, x40 or toll free 1-800-728-0066 x40.

Thanks for reading, I'll keep in touch. Feel free to do the same.