You know it is Spring when:

It was 6:15 AM Sunday morning May 18, 2008 and I walked outside as I waited for my ride to pick me up to go to my morning church meetings. I was amazed by how loudly the Magpie's were that morning and knew something must be up. Then I saw a very funny act of nature taking place on the stage of my front yard. There were three very loud upset adult magpies making a lot of noise and swooping toward the ground on the other side of some rose bushes that are between me and the vacant lot to the north. Then there appeared out of the tangle of bushes a cat that has come to call our place home ever since the neighbor that owned it moved away and the house was torn down in that lot. It ran as fast as it could across my lawn because hot on it's tail was one of the magpies swooping close to it's head and then darting around to take another shot. Finally when it was to the side of my house it stopped and the magpie landed on the ground just a couple of feet away. They looked at each other and then the cat moved away and the bird flew up into the top of one of my pine trees.
I started wondering why the worry from the birds and decided to investigate the scene just a little more closely and that is when I found three young magpie birds in the apple tree next to the rose bushes. I still had a couple on minutes before my ride would arrive so I grabbed my camera, put on a 70 to 300 mm lens and started shooting. It was still quite early and the light was still rather low so I adjusted my camera ISO to 1000 before I took any pictures. I found it a whole lot easier to hit the magpies with my camera than I ever could as a youngster trying to hit them with a bullet to keep them out of the chicken coop and our eggs. Here is the proof.