Weekend

It was nice to sit back and relax this weekend – well, relax as in ‘less than 15 things happening all at once’. We made some real progress toward finishing the backyard … I cemented in the fence posts, we finished mulching a good portion of the new gardens, we moved and replaced parts of our backyard fence to give us some more room next to the porch – a lot of work, but the yard is looking 100x better than it did a month ago. Good enough, in fact, to enjoy margaritas on the back porch with my wife, my mother-in-law, my brother-in-law and his girlfriend. And it was nice to be sitting out there socializing and seeing bird after bird come to feeders within feet of us – downy woodpeckers, carolina wrens, titmice and our cardinal family all visited while we were sitting there. That’s what we wanted to create, and it looks like it worked.

Speaking of cardinals, our neighbor found their nest the other day, and I’d been keeping watch to see if I could check out the young. I wasn’t having much luck, but I figured I would go over there with some mealworms to see if the adults would actually take them from my hand. They seemed interested when all of a sudden they got all flustered, excited and agitated. I look down and realized why – there was a young fledling sitting at my feet. While I was excited to see him/her, I also looked and realized that it most likely should NOT have been out of the nest. It was tiny, had barely any feathers (basically just like THIS picture), and flew … well, it tried to fly with mixed success. The parents were getting frantic, and I thought I should let them deal with their wayward youngun’.

I went to get Shari to show her, and she started to think the same thing as me – the parents were way too agitated for this fledgling to be out of the nest yet. So, we climbed over our neighbors fence and after a short chase (and a couple of dive bombings by the parents), I managed to gently scoop the little guy up. We then made the long journey around our yard, through our neighbors and over to the nest, where I put the little guy back in. Before I could pull away my finger, however, he jumped onto it. When I tried to gently push him off with my other finger, he hopped to that hand. This went on for a minute or so before I was finally able to get him onto a branch and walk away … in time to see ANOTHER fledgling on the ground, too – doing the same thing we had just ‘saved’ the first from.

LESSON: most baby birds will make their way out of the nest when they are ready. Let them be unless they are in imminent danger – they probably aren’t as helpless as they seem. My guess: the parents were more upset that the baby flew directly to me, and then went wandering a bit too far from the nest, than they were upset that the baby was out of the nest in the first place. Either way, the traumatic effect didn’t seem to stop them from coming back for more mealworms to feed the hungry mouths.

It’s a shame that we were so wrapped up in our saving the bird to bring the camera – he was quite a beauty (for being all bald and stuff). I did get a couple of great shots of the father on Friday, though.

And another shot of a house wren that I’m hoping will nest in our yard.

Links O’ the Day

• Chili Sauce of Death
• Grocery Store Wards – an organic grocery parody of Star Wars (Thanks, Van, for both links)