1st Baby Bluebird Is Out Of The Box 8-15-07

Your redbirds are probably Northern Cardinals which we have plenty of in the lower part of Minnesota but very very very few up where I live. We get one or two occasionally but not often enough, I wish they were here all the time.

Very nice...I've tried nesting boxes for years without success. This gives me hope
csroc

This thread is soooo neat. It's like watching a documentary on "Animal Planet".

Lady B

I'm with Lady B. I haven't looked at this in awhile and geez Cher, or Big Momma Bird!!, you should submit this to Nat'l Goegraphic!!
I don't know anyone else who has built their own bird nests!! Good job!!

Don't the parents get mad if you touch their babies?

How was the nest making? good thing you don't have to feed that babies yourself, I'd hate to have you chew up those worms before feeding them to the young...

Wow, Cher, those are awesome!



They don't seem to, no. I'm guessing that was probably a myth perpetrated by generations of parents who didn't want their kids bringing baby birds home, <grin>. I've taken several baby mockingbirds and blue jays away from one of my cats when she's caught them, and despite extensive handling (checking for injuries - fortunately the cat is more interested in playing than killing, and she rarely hurts them), the parents always take the baby back. (They don't forgive the cat though - the mockingbirds especially make her life miserable anytime she's out. And they even seem to recognize that she's the guilty party, because they'll go after her but yet leave my other cat [who is too fat and lazy to hunt anything] alone).

Probably the most amazing thing I ever saw parent birds do was when I was stationed in Hawaii. There are little green and yellow birds there called Japanese White-Eyes (they have a perfect white circle around their eyes), very cute and you see them all over. One year I was spraying some potent weed-killer along the back fence, and only after I'd gone past a particular point did it actually register on me that there was more in that one spot than weeds. A barely-fledged white-eye was on the ground in that clump of weeds, didn't see him right away because being green, he blended in well.

I was horrified, not sure what the weed-killer might do to him, so I snatched him up and took him in the house, and gave him quite a rinsing-off. I made up a perch for him in a box, and because I didn't know then that a parent will take a handled baby back, I figured I'd have to feed him the rest of the way to adulthood (fortunately they eat both insects and nectar rather than parent-regurgitated seeds, don't think I could come up with much substitute for that, bleh). Later my [then] husband found another baby in the yard, this time being stalked by the neighbor's cat, so he picked that one up and put him with his mate so he didn't become a cat-snack (didn't have cats myself then, so no danger inside the house).

Within a short time, though, the feeding issue was resolved by the parents themselves. I'd put the box on top of the kitchen counter at the back end of the kitchen, out of drafts and where it wouldn't be disturbed. The windows as always were open, and of course the babies' chirps could be heard from outside. As the window in the back door (from the kitchen to outside) didn't have a screen, it wasn't long before the parents flew in to investigate.

They actually seemed pretty happy with the arrangement, and they flew in and out of the kitchen all day long with bugs for the babies (I got a little miffed that a lot of what they were finding were juvenile praying mantises...hey guys, can't you at least take the *bad* bugs instead of the good ones?). They'd fuss at us if we were too close to the box when they came in, but otherwise they didn't seem to care that we were nearby and/or handling the babies.

Probably the funniest part was them giving the babies flying lessons inside the house, somewhere I still have some video of that and one of these days I'll have to digitize that. Even then the parents seemed to understand that the babies were safe, because rather than encouraging them to fly towards the open window, they were taking them across the open space between the kitchen and living room. Once they could fly well enough to make it all the way across on their own, we put them back outside.

;D Isn't it amazing how short their tales are but I suppose if they were any longer, they'd get busted up in the box. There are still two more in the box this morning, I'm trying to cook macaroni for salad and having a hard time cause I want to go outside to watch.

Oriongal, that's totally incredible, please do try to digitize it, I'd love to see it.

Okay, I found it and got it captured. I thought I had some video of them flying across the living room, but if I do it wasn't on this particular tape (and if not here, not sure where it would be). Not the greatest quality video, but good enough to tell what's going on anyway.

Video of Japanese White-Eye babies and parents

Starts with a quick zoom in to Mom or Dad with babies, then shows Mom or Dad (and both of them in one frame) hanging off the lamp cord of the kitchen overhead light. They were trying to get the babies to fly up to the top of the kitchen bar cabinets. They did succeed, and the next part is of the babies sitting on the vases I had on top of the cabinets. There's a quick zoom out to give it some perspective, then back in where I caught Mom or Dad bringing in a snack. Last part is the babies huddled up sleeping - they had a wooden dowel rod perch down inside the box, but after they'd been indoors a few days (and figured out that there wasn't anything threatening them) they preferred the edge of the box instead.