Day 355 - Home - Tweet - Home

World meet Bird....Bird meet the world!

For the last two weeks I have been on an emotional rollercoaster

Watching a little baby bird grow up right in our own back yard

About two weeks ago Wes found a little baby bird sitting in the center of a small bush in our back yard

It was so tiny, so fuzzy, so cute! And it broke my heart that it was out of its nest and alone

It's so hot and dry in Arizona right now and I knew this little guy wouldn't make it long on his own

But after looking for its nest and not finding it, I also knew there was nothing I could do to help him

(Myk and I had a terrible experience trying to save baby birds when we were little)

Heart broken I went to work and worried all day about how awful my little bird's fate would be

To my surprise my little bird was still (alive) sitting in the bush when I got home that evening

This made me happy...but I still worry about how long he would last

I check on him every time I took the dogs out...I could even see his little heart beating while he slept

After another day of this I finally broke down and googled "what to do with lost wild baby bird"

Luckily I found a great wild life blog that explained that this little guy probably wasn't lost at all

Apparently at a certain age the mom & dad bird start kicking the babies out of the nest

They separate the baby birds and leave them in dense brush or grass that can hide and protect them

By separating the babies they insure a greater chance of survival for that generation

(If left in the nest all together...one predator could take out the whole brewed in one fell swoop)

Once separated the parent's spend all day flying in between each baby, feeding them every 20 minutes

This process is called fledgling and it's best to just let the baby bird be so the parents can come feed it

I was hopeful that this is what my little bird was doing and tried to keep a close, but distant eye on him

This was going well except that I began to worry when he disappeared two days ago...

But today I got home and Steve and Corey told me that the little bird wasn't in his bush but

Instead was out hopping across the rocks and walkway in our yard just past the little bush

I looked out the window just in time to see the baby bird hop into the grass and over to our citrus tree

Once at the base of the tree, a bunch of grown birds that had been up in the tree tops started to react

One bird (I am guessing the mom) came all the way down to the lowest branch of the tree...

There she tweeted, flapped, and coxed the baby bird to start jumping...

He jumped and jumped until he finally got up into the little void where the two trunks of our tree join

(About 6-8 inches off the ground) And there he sits...in the base of the tree where his family lives

My little bird is alive and growing up...soon he will learn to fly (hopefully not going too far away)

And I got to see it all happen right here in my yard!