House Finch Sorrow
As a new backyard birdwatcher I marveled at the Very Busy House Finches building a nest under the eave of our porch. It's an old house finch haunt, apparently; they come back to the same nest year after year. 
The previous owner told us about the nest, and said it'd been there since they bought the house. They'd never had the heart to take it down -- even though over a sliding glass door doesn't seem like an ideal location. Someone put a little ledge up there to encourage nest building, and it works. Each spring the birds spruce it up with new, found materials and get busy. We have lots of house finches on our feeders, but two chose to call the nest home, and I was thrilled. All spring I've watched these busy birds swoop in and out, and I've just been waiting for the day I hear little peeps. It's been tough to wait, especially since I don't know a typical house finch schedule. When should I expect babies? Larger, heartier birds like eagles have had their young in Colorado, so I reasoned it would be when the weather warmed a little. Wait wait wait.
Today while on our deck I found two dead, newly hatched birds. Bare and featherless, just lying on our porch. From internet photographs I think they were a day old, maybe two. (I took a photo, but don't have the heart to post it. It's not gory, just so sad.) Thank goodness I scooped them away before the girls noticed -- O, especially, has been focused on death lately. For a few days it was just grandparents we talked about, because a friend's grandparents had died. But the conversation has now come around to me dying, and funnydad, and then to whether or not they were going to die. "Will I stay dead?" O asked, and wailed at the answer even though I delivered it with as much tenderness as I could. (I should mention that this all came to a head at an ice cream parlor of all places, a location not known to induce tears.) Promises that this would not happen for a long, long time didn't help, and who can blame them? Big Things are hard enough to comprehend when you're a grown-up, let alone three. After a tearful morning trying to get my usually bright-eyed daughters thinking of something else, I did not want them to be faced with baby bird death on our deck.
I don't how it happened, or why. The parents could have tossed them out of the nest, slave to an instinct I don't understand. Or, they could have been victim of a more aggressive species like a blue jay, but I don't see very many of those around here. I don't think the nest's location (above a sliding glass deck door) has anything to do with it, because the nest had been used successfully in the past. Disease? The near-frost we had the other night? I'm sure the possible reasons are many.
My internet searches tell me little, other than there are a lot of odd people with birding journals on the web. It's so sad, and I'm looking for answers, trying not to think of these as my house finches, and trying to remember that this kind of thing is common for birds. For lots of animals.
Some of the vague and specious sources I've read seem to indicate that the nesting season for house finches is months long. Perhaps there is a chance of another clutch of eggs above our deck. I hope so, and I hope they meet with a better fate.
The previous owner told us about the nest, and said it'd been there since they bought the house. They'd never had the heart to take it down -- even though over a sliding glass door doesn't seem like an ideal location. Someone put a little ledge up there to encourage nest building, and it works. Each spring the birds spruce it up with new, found materials and get busy. We have lots of house finches on our feeders, but two chose to call the nest home, and I was thrilled. All spring I've watched these busy birds swoop in and out, and I've just been waiting for the day I hear little peeps. It's been tough to wait, especially since I don't know a typical house finch schedule. When should I expect babies? Larger, heartier birds like eagles have had their young in Colorado, so I reasoned it would be when the weather warmed a little. Wait wait wait.Today while on our deck I found two dead, newly hatched birds. Bare and featherless, just lying on our porch. From internet photographs I think they were a day old, maybe two. (I took a photo, but don't have the heart to post it. It's not gory, just so sad.) Thank goodness I scooped them away before the girls noticed -- O, especially, has been focused on death lately. For a few days it was just grandparents we talked about, because a friend's grandparents had died. But the conversation has now come around to me dying, and funnydad, and then to whether or not they were going to die. "Will I stay dead?" O asked, and wailed at the answer even though I delivered it with as much tenderness as I could. (I should mention that this all came to a head at an ice cream parlor of all places, a location not known to induce tears.) Promises that this would not happen for a long, long time didn't help, and who can blame them? Big Things are hard enough to comprehend when you're a grown-up, let alone three. After a tearful morning trying to get my usually bright-eyed daughters thinking of something else, I did not want them to be faced with baby bird death on our deck.
I don't how it happened, or why. The parents could have tossed them out of the nest, slave to an instinct I don't understand. Or, they could have been victim of a more aggressive species like a blue jay, but I don't see very many of those around here. I don't think the nest's location (above a sliding glass deck door) has anything to do with it, because the nest had been used successfully in the past. Disease? The near-frost we had the other night? I'm sure the possible reasons are many.
My internet searches tell me little, other than there are a lot of odd people with birding journals on the web. It's so sad, and I'm looking for answers, trying not to think of these as my house finches, and trying to remember that this kind of thing is common for birds. For lots of animals.
Some of the vague and specious sources I've read seem to indicate that the nesting season for house finches is months long. Perhaps there is a chance of another clutch of eggs above our deck. I hope so, and I hope they meet with a better fate.
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