Baby Birds!

It was sad. I found 2 dead baby house wrens around the garden area. But wait...what's that? 2 babies who survived! We brought them in and put them in a small box with a towel to stay warm. The next day we bought a cage to keep them in until they were old enough to go out on their own. Now begins the routine of playing mama bird. Every 20-30 minutes these little ones are HUNGRY! And they peep, and peep, and peep and let you know it. They start about 6:30AM and they go to sleep around 8PM. All day, every 20 minutes. LOL

They started on soaked dog food until they were old enough to accept mealworms. Now I get to feed them worms with tweezers. They love the mealworms! And they are really starting to hop and "fly" if only for a few little flaps around their cage. I took them outside to play in the garden beds a few times - in the ones with the wiring around them. They had so much fun hopping around! I brought out the mealworms and laid them on the soil so they could learn to pick up the food on their own instead of being hand fed.

Wow, they're really starting to fly around that cage. We let them out and did they have fun flying around the room. Sometimes they'd come land on us and chirp, sometimes the poor things thought that the branches I painted on the wall were real and they would fly over to land....and it was just a wall! They landed on the vines and fake plants on the plant shelf.

Hmmm, now they're getting older and they will need to learn to be on their own soon. At this point we start putting the cage outside during the day and opening up the door. They fly out to the back woods during the day, but about every hour or so they fly back and scream for food. LOL. And they will even peek in the windows until they see me and start yelling for me. Sometimes I just have to walk out the back door and hold the tweezers up in the air and they fly in for a meal.

After a few days they still want to be fed, but they don't want to come as close to me anymore. That is good, but sad too. They go longer and longer without needing to eat from what I give them. They still fly into their cage at night to come in for the night, but after a little over a week they just fly into the yard. Then one day we go whistle for them and they don't come back. After about 5 minutes one of them shows up. They must have gone far because it usually only takes a few seconds. The other one never does come back. Then about a week later they are both gone and on their own.

It was a great experience and even though I was pretty much homebound for at least 3 weeks to take care of them it was worth it.