Bye Bye Birdies

On Saturday, our baby trash birds turned three weeks old and left their nest - right on schedule!

On Friday, one of them ended up on the ground - not sure if it was by choice - and spent the day hopping around our yard while the mama bird stood guard on our fence. On Saturday, three more came out, and by Saturday night, the fifth baby (possibly the last one that hatched) came out.

They hung around our yard on Sunday - all five babies lining the fence over their house. And today... we see an occasional starling flit by, and all we can do is wonder.

Here are the photos of their development (this is my life now - I've had nothing better to do for three weeks than document the life progression of baby trash birds).

Here's the mama nesting on her eggs:

I was obsessed with the eggs. They were so pretty. Everything from their color to their smallness intrigued me. Eggs are miraculous to me.

Here are the babies on the day they hatched. At this point, the fifth egg still hadn't hatched. The babies were squirmy but couldn't lift their heads yet. 

A couple of hours later, the fifth egg hatched. The first four babies could lift their heads to squawk for food, but the youngest one couldn't yet (which is why you can only see the four mouths in the photo).

The mama and papa spent hours and hours flying back and forth feeding the babies. It was interesting to me that both parents were involved. I don't know a lot about birds, but I just kind of thought the father wouldn't be involved. There were always two adult birds, though. Way to go nature! Way to go Papa Bird!

Here are the babies when they were two days old:

It was rare to catch them sleeping in the first few days because they were always begging for food with their creepy, little, open mouths. 

Here they are at five days old:

Here's a side by side from the day they were born and nine days old:

This is how they looked at twelve days:

By18 days, they were poking their heads out of the hole in the birdhouse to look around. 

I peeked in a few days short of three weeks and could only see four birds. I wondered if one had left, but later that day, all five were visible, so I guess he was just buried under the siblings somewhere.

This is the first escapee - day 20. 

Here are the remaining four on day 20. 

Then on the morning of day 21, everyone left except this little guy.

 And he was gone by evening.

It's actually been pretty cool to watch them grow. This isn't our first batch of baby birds, but we've never watched any of the others quite so closely. Most of the time we can't get a close-up look. A few years ago we had some robins nesting in our peach tree, and the mama was really aggressive. Any time I went out in my yard to water the garden, she would dive at my head and ruffle my hair. We pretty much kept the kids inside for two weeks until they left. The starlings were much nicer. Sometimes the mama and papa would squawk at us if we were close to the birdhouse and they were trying to get home, but they didn't ever attack us. I'd like to think we had an unspoken agreement. 

Our other birdhouse still has birds in it (or has more birds in it - possibly the third batch of the season), but we can't see them because of the way they've built their nest. We can hear them, though. 

At some point, Scotty is going to make the hole smaller on the starling birdhouse so we don't get starlings again. We also read that we should remove the perch to discourage aggressive birds from nesting in there. Even though they have a bad rap, the starlings were actually quite pleasant. It's unfortunate that they grow up to be meddlesome.