anonymouse

So. There were baaaaaaby mockingbirds in our backyard last month. In the orange geiger tree right outside the bedroom window. I watched the parents bring bits of grass and twigs and stuff, forming the nest. I watched the mom sit on the eggs. I did not see the hatching, but the meep-meep-meep calls the babies sounded alerted me to their presence. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology tells me that it was not the mother alone who kept flitting back and forth between hunting and feeding. Both mother and father bring food to the nests. They don't do the eat-regurgitate-feed thing. We think only one nestling, the most active one who practically fell out of the nest trying to get its face stuffed with whatever centipede or creepy-crawly thing its parents brought him. It. Yeah. I saw his mother (I think -- male and female mockingbirds have identical markings) talking to her baby in the bottlebrush tree. The baby, nearly almost as big as its parents, so I guess it was more like a teenager, had a squeaky sort of voice, and they were calling back and forth at each other.

And now we have baaaaaby doves sitting in a nest atop a patio support beam. Their heads are the size of thumbnails. They only hatched last Thursday, and they're already stretching their wings.

Doves apparently have a fairly egalitarian mode of nestling caretaking. I saw a changing of the guards when they were warming the eggs, and I see a changing of the guards now that they're protecting their little babies. Awwwww. And regurgitating food into their mouths. Ewwww. But also awwww.

I fucking love birds. And I need Nick Baxter to do my European magpie/satin bowerbird chestpiece NOW.