return of the tweeters

the birds returned to nest in our plants // mar – apr ’11

01 : mother bird that flies out to peck at you if you come too near
02: mother bird out for lunch
03: hatchlings
04: pin feathers

After chatting to our neighbours, we discovered the bird-parents had 2 nests. Talk about diversifying your risks and multi-tasking.

One night, we found only one chick in the nest, while the other one was strangled in the branches a few centimeters away from the next.   We kept watch till midnight, but the mother bird didn’t come back to roost. Cue the humans panicking. We thought she had abandoned her chick, like the other mother bird abandoned her eggs last year when there was a threat. There we were wondering at 1am what to feed it and how to keep it warm in the windy night, googling away like mad for the possibilities. In the end, we fed it mashed up bread mixed with water and honey with a chopstick and nestled a cotton cloth around it.

Thankfully, the mother bird came back the next day. I think my whole family teared.

Not so thankfully, I found out from my British & Australian colleagues the next day that the stronger sibling usually pushes the weaker sibling out of the nest. Survival of the fittest. So, the victim we were fretting over, was actually the culprit. Ouch, reality check, right there.