Phoebe fledglings
The good news is, Mama Phoebe
fledged five babies. Pretty impressive!
The bad news is, when
those babies started hopping out of the nest for their couple of days
on the ground learning to fly, Huckleberry started picking them off the
way I gorge on ripe strawberries.
When we found the first
baby on the ground, Mark installed a little porch beneath the nest to
let the overflow spill out onto. We figured maybe that baby had simply
fallen out of the nest because the receptacle was way too small to hold
all those growing birds. After reading a snopes article debunking the
notion that birds can smell human on returned babies, I put the dropped
fledgling back up high.
That worked fine until
the rest of the fledglings tried to learn to fly...and ended up right
in Huckleberry's jaws. I know for a fact he got two of the babies and
have a sinking suspicion he might have tracked down yet more.
As much as I enjoyed
watching the phoebe life cycle up close and personal, I'm hoping Mama
Bird learned her lesson and will return to nesting in the barn next
year. It's just safer there.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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