We welcome Do, Re, Mi, Fa ,and So to the Nichols’ Nest.
Bill redeemed this old piece of metal with his paintbrush. It welcomes all our guests, not just the feathered kind.
TIME OF BIRTH: Uncertain. They were still only eggs late yesterday, and the Hovering Mama was sitting on the nest early this morning during a horrible thunderstorm. I’ve heard that storms and bumpy roads can bring on labor with humans, so perhaps it did the same for the wren babies this morning. They were all too curious about what was going on around them. By noon today, we peeped in to be surprised by bobbing heads and very large unopened eyes.
BIRTH WEIGHT: Unspecified. Since the mother wren only weighs about as much as two quarters, I figure they’d weigh in at about a dime’s worth each.
LENGTH: Unknown. I don’t think the Hovering Mama is ready for me to take measurements. Now she may only be five inches long, but she’s feisty.
Welcome to the World, Do, Re, Mi, Fa, and So!
We are assuming both parents will be feeding and protecting Do, Re, Mi, Fa, and So for the next sixteen or seventeen days. Yeah, that’s right. We named them, and we have great expectations that these songbirds will be musical like their parents. We’re helping out by making certain that clean water and a mound of dried mealworms are near.
In a couple of weeks, these nestlings should have feathers, and they will find an abundance of food and water all on their own. Think about it. For wrens, it’s fifteen days of sitting on the nest, and then only another couple of weeks of feeding them, and the parents send them to the skies. Seems like a few seconds compared to nine months, then labor, then twenty-two years until they can fly on their own. And parenting? Well, it’s for a lifetime.
Stay tuned. We’ll be sending out graduation announcements before you can whistle a wren’s song.
