Tuesday, June 17, 2008

I come by it naturally

My father went out one morning and saw that the robin's nest which had been perched rather precariously in a rose bush had the side broken out of it and all four of the little nestlings were spilled out onto the ground. Dad wasn't sure it would work, but he took the remains of the nest and put it in a flower pot, put the babies back in the nest and wired the entire thing back into the rose bush in approximately the same spot it had been in. Mom and Dad Robin never missed a beat. Last week when I was up, I got to see all four babies in the nest, and one by one they fledged and were gone. When I got too close for comfort, the mother would fly up on an overhead wire and she must have been sounding some sort of alarm call to them, because they would hunker down and get very still when she did it. Dad also had a clutch of chickadees in one of his boxes. I bought him another hummingbird feeder so he could place it farther out in the yard and not have the battles over the one by the porch. He has a bully.

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