Nesting Season

Here's one you could file under the heading of "instant blogging", or one I've been sitting on for a while. It's actually I'd guess close to a month and a half coming.

To start off, this was at my parents' house. Just outside the walk-in door to the garage, a hummingbird couple had made their nest. Looks quite a bit, to me, like they found a good deal of the material in a paper shredder!!! That's my mom's hand in the first picture, with the tiny little eggs, smaller than your standard size jelly bean.

And there's momma bird, sitting on her eggs.

I don't know how long after they'd hatched this was, but that's the chicks a while after having hatched.

And, the final shot of the hummingbirds, I was holding up a smallish key, not in the foreground, but right next to the nest, for scale.

Around the back yard, there's a cow skull decoration mounted on the wall. Turns out to be a perfect place for a dove to build her nest!!!

This was while we were having a lunch there, probably for Easter. My younger tells me I should do a selfie with the dove on her nest... so that's what I did!!!

And, finally, I got to watch almost the whole process on these finches!!! This is right outside my work area, turning my head about 30° to the left from my monitors. I saw when momma and daddy started showing up, bringing nesting materials and weaving them into a nest.

Within around 2 1/2 to 3 weeks, they'd hatched, and the finch parents were bringing them noms. They grew up quick, and within a couple of weeks had left the nest.

I had been wanting to re-string the lights I'd gotten for my hanging Christmas tree at the end of last year, to run them all the way along the awnings, but I didn't want to disturb them, so I held off until they were gone. Speaking of disturbing them, back when it was the egg-sitting phase, I'd let the cat out into the front room once, and he would get up by the window, and stare at them, and they would get spooked and fly off. When I had the ladder set up, re-stringing the lights, he was at the same window watching me!!!