Bird Watching: baby birds, 1 by blmlb

blmlb wrote:
Well, things aren't looking all that good for the tiny mocking birds in my lemon tree. Today I went to the golf course, got home about 1PM. When I was coming into the house I took a look at the bird nest in the lemon tree. One of the little critters was perched on a branch about 18" away from the nest.
He appeared to be very immature, stupid looking with a bit of fuzz right on top of his head. So I figured he was just out to air his feathers a little.
An hour later I had to do some big grocery shopping. When I got back he was nowhere to be seen. As I was carrying groceries into the house, I heard the unmistakable peep-peep of a little bird.
I tracked down the noise, and it came from the top of an overgrown hedge about 30' away from the lemon tree. The photo shows the lemon tree on the right side of the photo in the foreground. The peeps came from the big hedge in the background. It is about 30 feet from the lemon tree to the hedge. I gotta figure that the little critter managed to fly 30' from the lemon tree to the hedge.
Both of his parents were keeping a close eye on him. In fact, I could be wrong, but it looked like the mama bird flew in on several occassions just to feed the little fart.
I sat on the front porch from about 3:30 til 6:30, just keeping and eye on things, watching for stray cats to show up. No problem there.
But as I was sitting there, the parent birds never flew back to the lemon tree. And I suspect that there was nothing to fly back to. Could be that the dominate bird survived, and the other 2 did not.
It has come to the point where I cannot protect the one that has flown from the nest, but I will be out there tomorrow morning, just in case. If the parent birds are flying back and forth to the lemon tree nest tomorrow morning, then I will know that there is a bit more protection needed.
I suppose that nature works the way it is meant to, even when it does not work the way we would wish.