Many of the images didn't turn out well, they're dark and blurry. But if you click to enlarge, a few are pretty cute. (I hope to get a new, improved camera one of these days.) Please excuse the disgusting mess of bird droppings, it's amazing they can thrive in such an environment, isn't it?
Anyway, of the original five eggs, three birds survived and we were fortunate enough to see the first two actually take off and leave the nest. The third one left some time later. We now see juvenile house finches at the nearby bird feeder and I like to think they're our babies.
Several times we've seen a juvenile turn toward an adult female, presumable his mother, and gently touch her beak in-between bites of seed. They're so cute!
The three surviving babies start to grow.
They started peeking out and looking around a few days before they took flight. We could see them stretching their wings out from time to time.
We caught a shot of one just as he took flight for the first time.
He fell to the ground and landed in this gravel, where he rested a bit before trying again.
He paused for his first glimpse of the big world out there before flying off to begin his new life!
How old were they before they took their first flight. We had five babies, and when we looked at the nest this morning they were all gone. They were between 2-3 weeks old.
ReplyDeletewill the baby finches return to the nest after they start to fly?
ReplyDeleteI read that between 2-3 weeks after hatching is exactly when finches leave the nest. Ours were about 3 weeks old. Supposedly the babies don't come back to the nest. When they're old enough to breed, they'll go make their own. But this year the parents came back to the same spot and made a new nest! We now have four little blue eggs in there and a very protective mother. I read that's it's common for them to return the to same spot and build new nests year after year, if the babies fledge successfully. But if they were attacked by a predator, they won't return.
ReplyDelete