This picture was taken Friday and you can see four healthy little baby bluebirds.
Sadly, on Sunday morning we determined that Mr. & Mrs. Blue had abandoned the nest and I won't show you the picture that we saw. We don't know why they were abandoned - we haven't seen the parents so they may have fallen prey to a hawk or some other predator. Or they could have been spooked off by another bird - there has been a catbird making a lot of noise in the garden. Or mom and pop simply did not expect it to get as cold as it did those last couple of nights and the babies succumbed to the cold.
We'll never know.
The nest and babies have been removed from the box and hopefully we'll get another pair interested in making our garden their home. We went to Backyard Birds on Monday and got a new mealworm feeder and mealworms in the hope of making it as appealing as possible.
Keep your fingers crossed!
I will of course be keeping fingers crossed. I was so sad when you told me about this, and having to clean the box out cannot have been easy. But goodness, they are not cute like little duckling or chicks, are they? The wings look more like lizards or snakes with scales, and the colouring is amazing.
ReplyDeleteI hope the mealworms do the trick for you.
How sad. We had for two years a barn swallows' nest right outside our front door. We lost a few as well, but at least we didn't have to clean out the mess.
ReplyDeleteHope you get a new pair of bluebirds.
That would make me so sad too.. We had a momma lay her eggs in our propane tank.> She comes back each year. She had 10 eggs.. My son was curious and took them out..Yikes. We put 4 that survived his little hands and 3 hatched. They just flew away this week.. Blue birds are the prettiest.. Hopefully you wioll get some new ones..
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