The Slower Road

I’m busy with a couple of projects today and haven’t had any time to focus on a proper blog post. So I thought I’d share a couple of the flowers (peonies and columbine) that are blooming in our garden right now.

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As promised, I’m going off-topic today to wrap up the story of the baby robins that were living on our front porch.

About two or three days after I took the photos of the babies being fed (and our cat watching them intently), they flew away. One at a time, they would spend a while (the last one took nearly all day) sitting on the edge of the nest and occassionally flapping their wings or bouncing up and down. They looked like a little kid at swimming lessons, trying to work up the courage to dive into the pool.

We missed seeing the first one fly away (we’re guessing that may have been the “brave” baby that had been doing its nest-edge standing and wing-flapping for several days already).

The second one landed on top of our fence and stayed there for the better part of the afternoon, with one or both parents still feeding it. By that evening, it had flown away.

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The third one spent most of that same afternoon practicing its balancing act on the edge of the nest and also still getting fed by one or both parents. In the late afternoon, we looked again and the nest was empty. We’d missed seeing the last baby flying away!

We looked all around the garden to see where it had landed and, at first, couldn’t find it. Then we realized it was sitting on the cushion of one of our porch chairs; it had basically jumped from the nest and landed in the chair below. From there, it hopped / flew to the porch railing and, then, to A.J.’s car.

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From there, our last baby robin flew to the neighbor’s yard where one of its parents was waiting and led it, both of them walking/hopping, away to a safe spot.

Good luck, baby birds!

Continuing with our bird story from yesterday …

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baby robins!

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a parent with lunch, about to fly through the porch and into the nest

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when that parent (above) flew over her head and to the nest, Lila kept an eye on the chirping babies (on the other side of the porch) while lounging on the sofa

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Yes, yes, I know … it practically looks and feels like summer outside already. But we’re still witnessing a few sure signs of spring here in Lexington. Namely: baby birds!

A pair of robins (we call them Ozzie & Harriet) is now in its third year of building and inhabiting a nest on our front porch. Now on their third round of babies in that spot, they’re quite used to our comings and goings and don’t even mind it when we sit on the porch with them. We’re all so acclimated to each other, in fact, that Ozzie & Harriet don’t mind (too much) when our cat is on the porch with us. She, in turn, doesn’t seem too interested in the bird parents. But she is rather entranced by the high-pitched chirping of this year’s (three!) baby robins at feeding time.

For an off-topic springtime weekend, I thought I’d share a few photos of “our” birds. First, here’s one of the parents, about to fly up into the nest with some food. I don’t know of a good way to tell a male robin from a female, so I don’t know whether this is Ozzie or Harriet, but it’s clear that they both work hard at feeding their three hungry babies.

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