The three little cardinals left the nest Saturday morning to go out into the big new world. I awoke to a huge squawking and flapping out back which turned out to be the parent cardinals and a couple of scrub jays going at it, but I didn't realize until later, when I saw the empty nest, what was going on, and there was more of the same later.
They are so small! I was surprised that they are big enough to fledge. They were 10 or 11 days old, but looked so wee in the nest (and still do out in the open, actually). So anyway, later, after the scene I'd witnessed earlier, the parents were hopping around in the trees out back, making their encouraging chip-chip noises, and the little birds were gamely doing their learning-to-fly thing. I hid in the outdoor shower for a while to get these photos and then after I went inside, the scrub jays came back. They swooped at the trees where the babies were, and the parent cardinals swooped back at them, and it was really sort of horrifying in a bird-world sort of way. The jays were quite vicious and relentless in their attacks.
The mother bird with one of the young (I know it's a crappy photo; I don't care)
The parents watching vigilantly
So scrawny and sweet!
Taking a chance that the wings will work
After a bit, the fight began to center itself on the ground below one of the trees. I went out again to have a closer look and saw this:
Poor thing, I thought, its eyes weren't even open yet, which doesn't make sense with the fact that it made it out of the nest to this spot, but whatever. Its eyes were open, but it was clearly very frightened, and the jays were getting closer. I stuck around, figuring that I would scare the jays but the parent birds wouldn't leave the baby no matter what, and it worked. The jays left and the parent birds got the baby to come out from under the tree and they all went off to a tree in the meadow, where they are presumably today living happily ever after. We hope, we hope.
The angry dad—fightin' mad!
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