Baby birds

See that lovely mess of weeds that my garden has become?  I am not going to do a garden this year, and have let it go so it isn't too much of a surprise that it looks like this.  But, I did find a surprise when I decided to start pulling the weeds to take out these garden boxes.  I found...

...a nest full of baby birds.  Real live baby birds.  It surprised me at first, and I didn't realize what it was until I had pulled the weeds out all around it.  I was thankful that I didn't grab the nest, which I almost did while pulling the weeds.

Baby birds on the first day I found them.

I was also thankful that the Momma and Dad I assume kept coming back and feeding them after I backed away.  In fact, they would hang out on the eve of the house if we were close to the nest and wait.  We formed a pretty trusting relationship with the momma bird.  We watched it come back several times a day to feed them.  I was so glad.  We enjoyed being able to go out and get an occasional glimpse of them until they got big enough.  But, we mostly just stayed away to let the mom keep coming back to feed them.  I felt bad that I had pulled away all their cover, but they seemed to do fine.

baby birds on the 2nd day I found them.

These are Dark-Eyed Junco babies.  I didn't know that it's pretty common for them to build nests on the ground in places like tall weeds, grass and shrubbery.  It was a pretty neat experience for all of us to see these baby birds in our yard.  On the 3rd or 4th day they got big enough to venture out of their nest, so they started hiding in the other weeds.  I didn't see them but a few times hiding in the weeds after that.  I'm hoping they got big enough and flew away.  I still saw the momma bird coming to feed them for a few more days, then she stopped coming around.

On the first day we found them I had the boys make a nature page about the birds with a drawing.  They came out pretty good.

Aaron, 8 years.  He drew 3 birds because at first we thought there were only 3 birds, but the next day we noticed the 4th.

Aric's 5 years.  Maybe we noticed the 4th bird earlier, because here he has 4 birds.  Or, maybe he was more observant than we were! :)