When I was young a lovely thing happened, or so I think. I was walking around my parents' garden which was large and in the country, and saw that the gardener had cut a hedge fairly drastically and had bared a bird's nest. There were four baby birds in it, and of course the mother had flown and would definitely not be returning.
I took the babies with me and made a nest out of a small box with plenty of straw which luckily we had. The first day one baby died but the others thrived well and started to grow and demand to be fed with much noise everytime they saw someone!
They turned out to be thrushes and I named them Pip, Pop, and Pam.
Eventually they were growing up very quickly and needed to have exercise and to meet the outside world. I used to take them onto a lawn and they would walk around and try flying short distances with not much success! They became very daring, and actually flew up into a tree but couldn't fly down, so I had to climb up and rescue them!
After a while they became very grown-up and I felt it was time they could cope alone. I thought I would ignore them completely and hope for the best. And after a while they became wild birds, but for ages came down and sat on my arm and demanded to be fed!!
Polly
The picture is from the Official Web site of Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. www.outdooralabama.com
I took the babies with me and made a nest out of a small box with plenty of straw which luckily we had. The first day one baby died but the others thrived well and started to grow and demand to be fed with much noise everytime they saw someone!
They turned out to be thrushes and I named them Pip, Pop, and Pam.
Eventually they were growing up very quickly and needed to have exercise and to meet the outside world. I used to take them onto a lawn and they would walk around and try flying short distances with not much success! They became very daring, and actually flew up into a tree but couldn't fly down, so I had to climb up and rescue them!
After a while they became very grown-up and I felt it was time they could cope alone. I thought I would ignore them completely and hope for the best. And after a while they became wild birds, but for ages came down and sat on my arm and demanded to be fed!!
Polly
The picture is from the Official Web site of Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. www.outdooralabama.com
2 comments:
I was fascinated to read your post. It painted such a graphic picture of the baby birds and what a delicate process it must have been to bring up the three thrushes - nurturing and protecting them but at the same time encouraging them to become independent.
I am glad that Polly had such a satisfactory outcome from rescuing young birds. The experts say that young birds are best looked after by their mothers and it is unusual for them to be reared successfully by humans. Sometimes, chicks are deliberately pushed out of the nest if there are too many to be reared by the mother.
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