baby birds | wordsfromanneli

I know this is a blurry picture, but it has a story to it, so if I can beg your indulgence, I’ll tell you what happened.

Yesterday morning, I had our English cocker spaniel, Emma, out for a walk around the yard – on the leash in case Henry (the raccoon) showed up. She stopped to sniff something under one of the hazelnut (filbert) trees. I waited a moment and then I thought, “Oops! I bet she’s found another pile of Glosette Raisins (rabbit poop),” and I pulled her away. I looped her leash around the corner post of the veggie garden and went over to see what was so interesting.

It was a young bird on its back (which is never a good sign), and I tried to turn it over to see what kind of bird it was. As I nudged it, it opened its beak wide as if to cry out, but no sound came out. I thought, “Oh, the poor thing! It’s going to die out here in the grass. Not enough wing feathers to fly yet and not enough strength to cry out.”

I brought Emma into the house and looked for the Captain to tell him about the poor little bird. I couldn’t find the Captain right away so I took a picture of the bird. It was a l-o-n-g distance, hurried shot from the house deck way out to the front yard, but I got a fuzzy semblance of the bird. BUT, it had TURNED OVER. So maybe it wasn’t ready to die yet.

Next question: How did it get there?

I looked for a nest nearby. The most obvious answer would be the filbert tree overhead.

Yes, there was a nest. I could see only one other face looking over the edge. As I picked up the fallen bird’s tiny body, I could feel that it was still warm. I reached up to put it in the nest. It clung to my finger and gave it a squeeze as if to say, “Thank you.” Or maybe it was saying, “For God’s sake, please don’t drop me!”

The picture below was taken the next day, and shows the other baby robin that was in the nest. I still didn’t know if the fallen-angel robin had made it.

So I took my cellphone and reached up to try to get a picture of the inside of the nest. I couldn’t quite reach, but as my hand got near the nest, two baby robins perked up and so did both parents who had been foraging for food nearby. They came in like two mini fighter jets in defense mode.

Turn on the sound to get a sense of their alarm as I told them to “Smile please!”

For sure I was smiling when I saw that both babies were alive and well.

The robin’s nest lies empty, and four little newly feathered babies are braving the unseasonably cold spring. The wind ruffles the baby featherlets. Drips of rain plaster the down onto their skinny pink bodies. What little body heat they had must be replenished quickly with food brought to them by their parents.

Junior #1 sits, wondering what to do.

Junior #2 sits a little more hidden, waiting for his mother to feed him.

Mother robin wonders where she should look for food for her brood. She also needs to find Junior #3 and #4.

I felt so sorry for them all that I went out into the miserable, cold wind, and dug up a few shovelfuls of dirt in my garden, knowing that it is infested with the grubs of the ten-lined beetles. I threw them onto the upturned lid of an old garbage can.

These grubs hide deep in the soil and wait for potatoes to grow so they can eat them before I try to harvest them.

Then, satiated, they wait for the first very hot day to come out of the ground and fly around as ten-lined beetles, again, as they do every year, looking for me so they can land on my back where I can’t reach them, and I have to run around the yard screaming until the Captain comes out to save me.