Moth on Bed

Woodlet Mania: Fledging Day 2009!!!

The woodlets fledged today! And I actually saw it happen!! There are two of them. Here is one of my first photos of the day; they go downhill from here, but the sun and the shadow of the tree were against me. Yes...I'll blame it on that. More pictures to come!

I Was Wrong!

The woodlets are still there! The parents were feeding them this morning! There is still a chance that we will get to see them fledge! Yay!!!

AND I saw a roadrunner on the driveway as I was leaving this morning. It's a good day!

A Woodlet Head Appears...and Then is Gone??

This morning I saw the head of a woodlet for the first time this year! There it is, peeking out from the hole....or craning, rather. Mum is up above, having just fed the young ones (see the photos at bottom, and doesn't that look suspiciously like birdseed?). All of these photos were taken around 8:45 a.m., before I left for work this morning.


I was terribly excited; I checked last year's posts and learned that it was four days from first woodlet head sighting until the woodlets fledged. This weekend, I thought, this weekend it will happen! We will see them leave the tree!


By the time I got home it was rather late in the evening, but not too late for evening feedings, and when I walked onto the front porch I saw a little head sticking out from the hole in the tree, all right. But after getting closer, causing the head to withdraw, and waiting waiting waiting for it to appear again, it turned out to be...Woodie. Dad was in the hole, and I realized I couldn't hear the woodlets anymore, which means they must have fledged today.



A THOUSAND CURSES!


Will I never see them fledge, ever ever ever?


I also accidentally deleted the closeup photo of Woodie in the tree. A sad day for me, but a good day for woodlets, and all the better that Hamilton the Giant by happenstance was in the house today. And there's always the possibility that I am wrong, and the little ones are still in there....but I will not bet the cabin on it.

Cardinal With a Mohawk

This year's second batch of cardinals left the nest today! Hugh and I left the house unusually early so were not around to see, but the nest was empty when I got home, and so far I have spotted one of the three. This one is sitting in the butterfly bush that is next to the jasmine where the nest is. Part of the reason I am sometimes a rotten photographer is that I don't want to scare my subjects. I really need a new, better lens so I can get closer from farther away...

The Cardlets Fledge and Danger Looms in the Guise of Scrub Jays!

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!