Baby Birds

The baby birds in the nest on our garage gutter downspout are getting lively. They very nearly didn't get to be born in the nice protected nest under the garage overhang where they are now happily growing, as Ed mistook the first nest the parent birds built for a clump of leaves and knocked it to the ground. K. informed him, a moment too late, about what it was, and he felt just awful. Amazingly, the birds managed to rebuild their nest in time to lay their eggs (the drainpipe must be prime real estate, much like beachfront property, so that when a home is wiped out the owners immediately rebuild in the same hazardous location). I'm not sure what sort of birds they are, but the babies have funny little feathers on the tops of their heads that look just like hair sticking straight up.


I've been keeping an eye for the last couple weeks on a family of blue jays that have their nest in one of the magnolia trees in our front yard. Today, while raking up the leaves that the magnolias seem to drop endlessly, I noticed that the baby birds had left their nest and were hopping about among the branches. After finishing up under the nest tree I was raking under the other tree when I heard a thump. A dead branch had cracked off, and one of the little birds had had the bad luck to be sitting on it when it fell. He looked unhurt, and I watched him jump and flutter around the yard for a while, hoping that he might be able to fly back up into the tree. By the time he had jumped over to the neighbor's yard, though, and was heading toward the road, I realized that his flying skills weren't enough to get him up the ten or so feet to the lowest magnolia branch. I wasn't sure if the parents would reject the baby with human smell on him, so I called my mom (who knows just about everything!), and she suggested gloves. With Ed and the kids offering excited advice as well as assistance in fetching surgical gloves and a ladder, I caught the wandering baby and returned him to his tree. K. and I watched him for a little while, and, after sitting for a bit and pondering his affronted dignity, he hopped around the branches and back to the nest. I hope he will be more careful in his choice of branches in the future.



My garden is starting to fill out and look like a flower garden instead of an odd collection of sticks. K. loves to find newly opened flowers and show them to me, but also has the unfortunate idea that the bees want to play.