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.