(I figure the former because, otherwise, he could have simply settled in the flower basket. Sure enough, when I looked out the door, there's a little bird hopping around the balcony.Īpparently, the adopted bird either decided that he was ready to leave the nest or got overcrowded. I'm a country girl at heart, and I knew what that meant. Lo and behold, today I noticed something odd about the behavior of the mother and father birds, noticeably that they would fly at the balcony doors until I thought that they were going to crash, then flutter down to the balcony floor.

They've all grown, especially the adopted bird, who looks like he's going to be quite large. When I checked the birds the other day, the nest was getting crowded. I was a bit concerned at first that he might take the others' food, but they all seem to be growing quite well.) He was always the first to respond when I would move the nest, opening his mouth to be fed. (He's also the one looking at the camera. The adopted bird has grown quite noticeably larger than his brothers and sisters. Here they are at Day Six, slightly less ugly and starting to look like birds. We ended up with three tiny baby finches and their larger, adopted sibling. I don't know what happened with the fifth it wasn't pushed from the nest because it's nowhere to be found in the hanging basket or on the balcony. Here are the babies at Day One:Įventually, four of the eggs hatched. On 18 May, when I pulled the basket down to check the eggs, I found quite a surprise! Three of the eggs had hatched-including the adopted egg-and we had baby birds! They're so ugly when they're first hatched though, all bald little bodies and hungry mouths. The adopted egg is noticeably different than the others. Here is the nest before the eggs hatched. And I prefer to think of the 'foreign' bird as adopted instead. But because the nest is in the middle of a hanging basket, they'd only fall into the basket and not to the ground, so I was okay with that. My mom warned me of the possibility that the larger, foreign bird might push the little finch babies out of the nest. Clearly, it did not belong to the finches I figured (and others have confirmed my suspicions) that there are local species that are too lazy to raise their own babies and so lay eggs in other birds' nests to have the other birds care for them. The nest had five eggs in it: four were tiny and bluish the fifth was larger and white with brownish spots. Here are the pictures that I have of them so far.

The baby birds are eleven days old today. Of course, I got all excited and squeeful and started checking it regularly and documenting my finds with pictures. There was the most precious, tiny little nest with five little eggs in it. So I pulled the basket down to toss out the bird's nest before it got too far underway or (worse) had eggs in it.and I was too late. I noticed a lot of fluttering in and out and knew what that meant. About a month ago, I noticed that a pair of house finches were showing some interest in our hanging basket of snapdragons.

Zebra finch baby care