היומן של markbos_

One summer afternoon some years ago, while my wife and I were working in the yard, we a had remarkable experience. It had rained off and on for most of the day and everything was wet. The skies were dark and it was windy, with some gusts.

While working we noticed a couple robins were flying around the back of our house, calling, almost squawking. I’m not sure how long they had been flying and calling, but it was probably their persistence that grabbed our attention. They were both flying back and forth across the yard, calling urgently. So, we moved in to investigate what was going on.

I walked into the area where they were flying around and didn’t notice anything, at first. After some time looking around, We found a baby bird hunkered down next to some edging. Amazing how small they can get when they are hiding. We found another one hiding as well. We found only the two chicks.

“They must have fallen out of their nest.” one of us observed, and we started looking around for a nest up in the trees. In that area of our yard, there are eight large trees, a cottonwood, a blue spruce, and six large Norway spruce. Not an easy thing to find a nest in the pine trees, but we tried in spite of this.

Eventually we came across some debris on the ground underneath the blue spruce. It was made up of dirt and grass, and other stuff. It was busted up some, but we could discern the basic shape of a nest. Realizing the nest had fallen out of the tree, we stood there considering at the situation: The desperate parents flying around calling, the tiny babies hiding on the wet ground, the wind blowing, the dark skies promising more rain, and concluded that the babies had little chance of surviving on the ground.

At that point, we were trying to figure out if we had any options at all, other than just leaving them to take their chances. We discussed the rule we had heard about never touching baby birds, because the parents might abandon them. We talked about the raccoons, opossums, skunks, house cats, bobcats, foxes, coyotes, and other birds, etc. that we frequently saw around the property and concluded they really didn’t have much chance of survival out of the nest.

“Let’s put the nest back together and put it back into the tree. Then we can move the babies to the nest and maybe the parents will find them.” That became our goal, but we couldn’t reach the branches that we thought the nest had fallen from. They were too high, maybe 15 – 20 feet up. There were branches as low as eight feet, and those we could reach with a step ladder.

“How do we keep the nest from falling off the branch? Hmm…” That was a difficult question. We solved it by sewing the branch twigs together with cotton string. After weaving the strings throughout the twigs and needles of the branch, we put the pieces of nest together, as best we could, and placed it into the laced area we had made. The nest fit in the array nicely and appeared to be very stable.

Next, we had to catch the little babies and place them in the nest without hurting them. It wasn’t difficult to catch them and they were warm in our hands! We placed the two babies in the nest and took the ladder away and waited. We were pretty worried at this point about the parents abandoning the chicks due to our touching. To our relief, the parents went to the nest within a couple minutes and settled in.
We watched them in the nest for the next week or more, until one day they were all gone. It was a great feeling knowing that the brood was successful with our help.