Staff photo by Melissa Sue Gerrits: A parakeet temporarily takes up residence in a bluebird box in Katherine Lewis' backyard.
Kathy Lewis first noticed the flash of green in her bird feeder in mid-June.
She looked more closely and was surprised to see a parakeet busily feeding there side-by-side with cardinals, sparrows and other wild birds.
"I could not believe my eyes," she said. "I know that little bird had to get away from somebody."
As the summer progressed, the parakeet became a familiar and welcome sight in her yard in Lafayette Village.
"I guess it found a food source and started hanging around," Lewis said.
In mid-July, she saw the bird squeeze through the narrow opening of a bluebird house that had never been used since its placement on a tree in the backyard.
Staff photo by Melissa Sue Gerrits: Katherine Lewis takes a look at parakeet eggs in a bluebird house in her back yard.
Several days after that, Lewis used a mirror to peek inside the house and realized the bird that she'd been thinking of as a he was instead very much a she - she'd laid three white eggs. The next day, the nest held four eggs. By the end of July, there were six.
Lewis, an animal lover with two birds of her own, kept close watch on the parakeet and her nest, taking care not to scare the bird and wondering where it had come from and how it and its babies would survive in the wild.
The latter question was more timely than she knew. Sunday night, the weather got rough, with wind and heavy rain. Monday morning, Lewis went out to the bluebird house for a peek at the parakeet and found ... nothing. The little wooden house was empty, with nary an egg, sliver of shell or even a feather inside or on the ground nearby. And there's been no sign of the parakeet since.
Lewis was mystified. The birdhouse seemed impregnable to predators. But she hadn't thought of the possibility of a snake. When the idea was suggested, she shuddered.
"I'm hoping she just got so scared in the storm that she flew off," she said. "I hope she'll come back."