From the back porch - 5/2/2018

I got my act together a little early this morning, and so there's time for a little porch-sitting before work.  Morning porch-sitting is the best.  Everything - even the wildlife - is fresh and rested, damp, fragrant.  Squirrels and birds and chipmunks dig and poke and scratch.

The birdhouse on the living room window is silent this morning; the babies have flown the nest.  As I was sitting on the porch Sunday evening, I heard a thump as one of the parent birds landed on the birdhouse roof with a bit of food in its beak.  Over the weekend, the bird parents had begun to feed their four babies from above, from the slanted roof of the birdhouse, instead of from the landing peg at the front of the box.  I guess it was coaxing the babies to poke their heads farther out of the nest.  In any case, one of the babies got over-eager and fell plumb out.  It caught itself on the window screen and clung there, chirping and fluttering, for a good five minutes as its parents flew back and forth, seemingly hysterical.

I watched this drama, trying to decide if the parents had wanted the baby to fall out of the nest and were praising it for a job well done and were calling out the rest of the siblings, or if they were well and truly panicked that one had left the nest prematurely.  The former seemed unlikely, as it was getting dark and, to me, a bad time to begin flight training.  All of the other babies were hunkered down in the box, chirping softly, as if they were saying to one another, "Gah!  Can you believe what Frankie did?  He's gonna get it when Mom gets home."  The parents continued to fly to the top of the birdhouse and chirp.  I could not tell what they were saying.  After a while they resumed feeding the remaining babies in the nest.  Meanwhile, the renegade baby continued to cling to the window screen, panting, exhausted.

Intervention seemed necessary.  I put on some gloves with the intention of gently capturing the baby and putting him back in the nest, but as I reached out, the baby squealed and fluttered to the ground ten feet away.  He hopped into a patch of daylilies at the back of the house and went silent.

The Husband had been watching all this from his recliner, and he came out, put on the gloves, and started scratching around in the daylilies, looking for the prodigal child.  The baby squawked and flapped and tumbled and finally grabbed hold of the vents on the A/C unit, and The Husband gently caught him and eased him back in the hole in the front of the box.  When he turned the bird loose, one of its little toothpick legs was left hanging limply out of the hole.  I gently pushed it in with my forefinger.  The bird did not move.

After a few seconds, I began to worry.  Was the baby bird in shock?  Had it passed out cold from fear?  Was it dead?  If so, would it smother one or more of its siblings?  I watched as the parents flew back and forth with food.  First, two heads poked out from beneath the stunned/dead bird, then three.  But little number 4 remained still, piled atop his siblings.

I worried about this all day yesterday.  Should we not have intervened?

When I got home from work, the nest was empty, as far as I could tell (the hole in the house is a little too high off the ground for me to see into it).  I didn't see a bird carcass on the ground, so I assumed that either the baby had eventually "come to" and was happily flying with its family, or it had not survived and had been eaten by a scavenger (or, worse, was decomposing in the nest). 

I am happy to report that, by the end of the evening, we learned that all four babies had survived.  About dusk, I heard a thump as mama bird landed atop the birdhouse.  Soon, four fluffy little babies came careening in, like tiny kamikaze planes.  They all missed the landing peg and briefly velcroed themselves to the porch- and window-screens until they could re-orient and flutter back into their home.  I guessed they hadn't quite perfected their navigation skills.  I don't know if they spent the night in there or not, but they're not at home this morning.

And, with that, I find that I am no longer running early for work.