Baby Birds and Butterflies

Two nests of wrens have been emptied. One was in the baby's breath hanging basket right outside the sunroom sliding door. One of those babies didn't make it. We found the dead one still in the nest yesterday. SO took it out to the pen and dumped it there. It was starting to smell bad. Somehow the baby's breath is still alive, but just barely. I had been giving it sips of water while the baby birds were in there. I have a horror that I may have drowned the dead hatchling. My SO says I should not worry about it too much, that almost every brood loses one, either before they hatch or when they leave the nest. I know he's right but I still obsess over it a little.

The second nest was inside the garage, up on a high shelf, tucked between the handles on a pair of lopping sheers. For the last several days we have been shutting the door on the mother and her babies at night. I suspect that was distressing to her, but after a stray dog got in the garbage cans a week or so ago, we haven't dared to leave the garage open past dusk. Anyway, yesterday when I was letting the pets out, I heard a bunch of cheeping behind the spare fridge out in the garage. I quickly brought the animals inside so the parents could get their babies in flight. Later, when I went out to check, the nest was empty.

Other wrens have nested around me in the past. I had a couple in my Victoria home who persisted year after year to nest on the patio. At first it was inside a pot of geraniums on a plant shelf, but the last spring I lived there, they nested inside the grape ivy hanging right outside my bedroom window. I could stand inside the glass pane and peer through it into their nest. I watched in fascination through the days as the parents fed their young, then encouraged them out of the nest when the time was right. However, the fledglings had a different idea and didn't seem ready to leave the nest. The parents coaxed the five babies all around the patio for one whole day, with none of them willing to take real flight. I kept the cat in all that day while the parents struggled, only to eventually give in and leave the exhausted babies piled up inside a different hanging basket across the patio.

The next morning they were at it again, cheeping in that now familiar way they do when they're kicking out the babies. One of the adult birds would jump from the hanging basket, to the overhang on the roof, to a twiggy limb of the next door pecan, as if showing the kids the way to go. And one by one, they reluctantly followed their parent's lead, going the exact route that had been laid out: hanging basket to roof to pecan limb. All except for one who could not make it up and over the fence to the pecan limb. Each time it tried, it fell down into the side yard. I wanted to go out and help but knew not to interfere with nature. The next day I found that tiny new bird, dead by the back gate. Apparently, once they leave the nest, the parents don't consider it their responsibility any longer to feed the weakest offspring.

We have a boatload of nectarines coming ripe on the tree we thought was a peach in the back yard. The fruit has turned rosy red and ripe along the seam, so we've been picking them, trying to beat the stink bugs to the harvest. I flicked off two bugs yesterday and stepped on them. It's been an incredibly buggy spring this year. Can't say how many caterpillars I've seen, and worms. I step on them indiscriminately. I'm probably murdering would-be butterflies, but I don't trust anything right now. Almost every plant out there has leaves with holes in them from having been eaten by something. A few plants have had their leaves eaten entirely. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with all these nectarines, but whatever I decide, I had better do it quickly. We're leaving Friday on another week-long RV trip. It's supposed to rain while we're gone, so hopefully the garden will still be alive when we return.

Speaking of butterflies, I "made" one yesterday. It was my turn to host the birthday group, and so I decided to go with a spring theme. I had seen a diagram of the way to make a butterfly cake, and I followed the directions as closely as I was able. Maybe it was a little childish, but I had fun doing it. I used a lemon cake mix that I already had, cut the layer according to the directions, glued the pieces together with fluffy frosting, then laid on the decorations. I used gel food coloring and a child's Crayola paintbrush to color the sections. It wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be. The rest is colored sugar, candy wafers, and halved jelly beans. My SO encouraged me to take the picture. For some reason, it uploaded darker than it was in reality.

Onward ....