Birdland

Been keeping an eye on the sitting redbird in the Queen Palm these past eleven days, checking at least two times each day to see what was going on with mama and her three eggs. She couldn’t have been away from the nest more than two or three times in that stretch of days. I can remember only two times she wasn’t there when I crept close to have a look. I sort of lost count of the days since I first discovered the eggs and was beginning to think they were overdue for hatching. No such thing because when I looked this morning I found no mama but three newly hatched, wrinkled and brownish-pink hatchlings curled up in a ball. I say three but it’s a little hard to tell if that small mass in the nest is two or three babies. And today being the eleventh day since I first saw the eggs, they are right on time, hatching just when the expert said they would.

I’ve seen the mother and her mate fluttering in and out and around the nest several times today and I’m guessing they are bringing insects for the baby birds to eat. From the look of the babies you’d think they would have to force feed them for the time being. They look pretty inert there in the bottom of the nest. I understand that their food at this stage is exclusively insects because of the higher protein needed to sustain their accelerated growth rate while so young. Once they fledge they will begin to feed on seeds, fruits and berries. They won’t have far to go to reach the feeder hanging from my camphor tree full of  Black-oil Sunflower seeds.

Cardinal Eggs

My down the road neighbor, Lamar has asked a couple of times if I’ve found any bird nests in trees or shrubs around the yard, this being the season when birds build nests and lay their eggs. A couple of times I’ve told him, “No, haven’t seen any so far.” Maybe I just wasn’t looking hard enough because this morning I stumbled upon a mama redbird sitting in her nest about five feet off the ground. Stumbled is a good word in this case because I was taken by surprise, the last thing on my mind a bird sitting on her eggs. I was cleaning up the patch of papyrus stalks that grow about a dozen feet from the back porch and my eye caught sight of the bird’s nest wedged up in the fronds of a Queen Palm close to the papyrus. I looked more closely and saw a rounded reddish-brown mass nestled down in the nest but still didn’t recognize it as a bird. It looked a little like a decaying flower and when I tugged one of the palm fronds out of the way, instantly the “decaying flower” fluttered up and away revealing 3 gray-brown eggs with dark spots.

The red arrow points to the location of the nest.

 

Male left, female right

Something about the discovery made me almost joyous for a few minutes but then I quickly worried I might have scared the mother away for good. The worry didn’t last long because I tiptoed back for another look a half hour later and there was the mother once more roosting atop the eggs. It’s good to know that I now have ahead of me a daily look at or into the nest to see how the hatching is coming along. Looking it up, I see that a female cardinal lays from 1 to 5 eggs, usually 3 which hatch after 11-13 days of incubation. The female broods the chicks for the first 2 days with both parents feeding them a diet of insects. The chicks normally begin leaving the nest 7 to 13 days after hatching, more commonly 9 to 10 days. The parents continue to feed the chicks for as long as 25 to 56 days after they fledge from the nest. The young birds then join flocks of other juveniles and may begin breeding the next spring.

With me temporarily fascinated by the bird nest, Farina is left to her own devices.

Dawg Seat

Farina has never liked riding in the front seat of the truck. For most of the past year she’s been complaining about her place in the back seat. Can’t blame her for whining and pacing back and forth in a space too small for her sixty pounds and too uneven to give her secure footing. I’m sure anyone, dog or hobbit would be uncomfortable in that narrow space designed more for stowing stuff you don’t want to haul in the truck bed. And for a dog that loves to put her head out in the rushing air, side windows that don’t open are another bummer. At least she has the small window in back that opens.

Since she goes almost everywhere with me, I’ve worried that the narrow back seat with its equally narrow leg well could prove a dangerous trap for Farina under certain circumstances. Reason is, Farina has seizures at intervals of about once a month, a brief but definitely scary situation for both of us. For two or three minutes the dog is thrashing on the floor with foam and saliva pouring out of her mouth. I often worried that if it happened in the truck, she might fall down into the leg well on her back and choke on all that gunk boiling up out of her throat. So I thought about ways to prevent that from happening.

I figured the main point was to close that leg well gap and at the same time widen the bench seat. Why not fit a piece of half-inch plywood over the seat and the leg well? I took my idea to neighbor Randy—the one with all the skills and all the tools. We talked about cut outs in the plywood to fit around the curve of the two front seats and the armrest box between, figured out how to do the two supporting legs in the well and how to pad the surface to make it more comfortable. I went off to Home Depot with scribbled measurements and bought half a sheet of plywood and an eight-foot 2x4.

Like always, Randy did all the work with me trying to help out in small ways. He told me he loved doing this kind of job but really enjoyed working alone. Said he could concentrate on the job better that way. So I left him with his saws and sandpaper and with vacuum, brushes and lint roller I worked at cleaning out as much of the dog hair as possible from that back seat. It didn’t take Randy more than an hour to finish the job. I helped him fit it in behind the front seats and then he tacked down the canvas cover over the custom fit padded bench. We stood back looking at it for a bit then both wondered how Farina was going to handle the jump up onto the bench. Her footwork would have to take into account the covered leg well. She was sleeping over on the apron of Randy’s garage and I called her over to the truck. She looked up at the new arrangement; I said, “Get up!” and in one smooth movement she was up and in, standing with paws on the armrest between the front seats looking out the front. She seemed to be thinking, “Where’re we going?”

I ride a lot easier in the truck now knowing that Farina will be okay should one of those seizures come to call. In the past six weeks the vet has gotten the dosage of her medication to what seems like a good balance. The interval between seizures is lengthening.