Trying

Julian is the boy on the left - stretching tall to impress Hannah & Princess.

Sunflower envy

I love sunflowers and have had precious little success growing them. Needless to say, these photos weren't taken anywhere near my home. I took these photos a few weeks ago while driving the back roads of upstate NY.

Hand feeding a baby finch

This little one has taken up much of my time over the past 2 weeks. I found Sammy cold and barely alive on the aviary floor - a victim of the dreaded "gouldian finch baby tossing syndrome". Even after warming him in my hand for hours, I couldn't get him to open his mouth for a feeding. Along came hubby with the magic touch, who "tickled Sammy's chin", which caused him to start begging for food. And he hasn't stopped since.





Day 2 - here he is with a little food in his crop.






Day 5 - he's growing, but not as quickly as he would if his biological parents had kept him.





Day 13 - Sammy was too busy travelling (and eating like a pig) last week to pose for photos. As you can see, he's really progressing.






Day 14 - He has a full crop, but that's not stopping him from begging for more food.

A surprise in the country

Over Labor Day weekend, we left the absolutely beautiful (finally a bit cooler) weather of Lake Gaston and headed north to upstate NY for our annual family reunion at my sister's house. Up there we found equally beautiful weather and we enjoyed every minute of our roundabout back roads drive from my sister's house back to my parents' house on Monday.
The scenery was mostly farm houses and corn fields, so we were shocked to see these gold domes peeking above the trees.





It's the Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville NY.








Beautiful!

Hannah - single Mom

This is Hannah. She's a black head yellow backed female gouldian finch. I realize that her head color actually appears to be more white than black. In the yellow back mutation, the black head color is supressed, causing it to appear beige or gray.
Hannah has spent most of this breeding season laying and sitting faithfully on infertile eggs. She chases away any male that comes near her (thus the infertile eggs).
Well, she has now surprised me with a baby. I have no idea who Daddy is, or for that matter whether she is the biological Mom. She may have just moved into a nest where another pair had laid eggs.
In any case, this single mom is doing a bang up job raising the baby. It's about a week old now and getting larger every day.

The goldfinches

We have had a bumper crop of goldfinches this year at the lake. I'm begining to wonder if we're spending more on thistle seed than we are on gasoline.

Girls night out

Dockside Dairy on Lake Gaston is one of our frequent haunts, but tonight was the first time that we've taken the girls. I think they liked it!

Indigo Bunting

This indigo bunting flew into our sliding glass door, was a bit stunned, so I was able to take this photo while he rested for a few minutes before moving on.

????

I don't think I want to know what happened here -

Finch love

In the world of gouldian finch breeders there has been a lot of discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of fostering gouldian eggs or babies with society finches. At one time or another, most breeders have probably seen gouldian finch parents abandon their eggs or babies, or worse, toss the babies out of the nest.

Many gouldian finch breeders (myself included) keep some pairs society finches for these times. Society finches, those sweet cuddlers of the finch world, will usually take over as parents and raise the gouldian babies as their own.

Most breeders agree that it's important to remove the chicks from the society parents as soon as they are independent so that they do not "imprint" on the Society Finches and later in life reject pairing with other Gouldians. The following photos support this theory (kind of):

These photos show gouldian finch (Jerome) courting his lady-love, society finch (Honey). Jerome and Honey were actually raised together (hand-fed by me), then given to a friend. Two years later they "returned to the nest" and now live in the aviary with the other gouldians and societies. Even though they've been in the aviary for 4 months, neither of them show any romantic interest in the others of their own species (although they both still fly to my shoulder once in awhile).

Although he's trying to impress a Society finch, Jerome's mating dance is all Gouldian, with the head bowing, then stretching tall while twittering, and then hopping up and down. I especially like the third photo where I caught Jerome mid-hop in his "mating dance".

Mom's little helper

OK, after a few days of trying, I was finally able to get a photo of the "baby feeding the baby". Actually it's a juvenile gouldian finch (about 3 months old) feeding his 4 week old sibling (same parents, second clutch). Just like last time, the parents seem to be more interested in making more babies than they are in feeding the ones who just left the nest.

No photo available

There are 3 things that I wish I'd been able to photograph today:

• In the aviary this morning, one of my juvenile gouldian finches (only 3 months old) was feeding a young baby that had just fledged. I guess he remembered how it was to beg for food and not have mommy or daddy accomodate him right away. I've read about juvies who help raise the next clutch of babies, but I'd never seen it before.
  
• The mockingbird nestlings in a bush next to our church - I tried to photograph them, but I gave up because of problems with raindrops, my auto-focus not focusing on the babies, and the warnings from the nearby not-too-happy parents.
  
• The huge snake that was inside our house when we returned home today. No time to run for the camera, what with freaking out about how to get him out and trying to tell if he had been dining in my aviary (I was looking for finch-sized lumps in his long body). Well, he slithered out the same hole (presumably) that he had entered by, my husband (hero) filled the hole with gobs of caulk, and I took attendance in the aviary - all present. Now I really wish I had a photo of it for identification. I think it was a black rat snake, which according to the internet can grow to 8 feet. So, maybe my description of "huge" was slightly exaggerated. This snake was about 30 inches long and a little over an inch thick. If I had come in and seen an 8 foot snake in our house I would have been worried about our chihuahuas, not our finches, not to mention the fact that I would have never been able to sleep again.
  

Some big lips

Feeding the large carp at Eaton's Ferry Marina is a favorite activity for visitors (and residents) at Lake Gaston. They eat just about anything, but we usually feed them dry dog food.

A "cool" photo for a hot day

The daily temperatures here have been really high even for North Carolina. So I thought I'd post this ice storm photo that I took a couple of years ago to remind me that it could be worse.

Lovebirds at Lake Gaston

Ah, to be fifteen .....

Road trip with Vernon

Our little pet of 8 years is fading, quickly I'm afraid. A tumor under his wing has grown so large that he can no longer fly and can only hop up onto the lowest of perches.










This is so incongruous with the bird:

• who as a tiny hatchling that I held in my hand, stretched his neck and looked around in amazement at the great big world, while his brother Nolan beside him cowered and hid and his parents fretted about his momentary absence from the nest
  
• who had at least twice as much energy as any of my other parakeets and would fly at warp speed from shoulder to lampshade to ceiling fan to another lampshade to another ceiling fan to another shoulder, and yet
  
• who, when I took him with me to visit my animal-loving hospice patient, instinctively knew that he belonged on the shoulder of W, that soft-spoken man sitting in the recliner. And bonded with W so quickly on that first visit that I didn't have the heart to separate them, so he moved into their home for the last few months of W's life, then stayed on with his wife for another year.
  
• who, after W's wife adopted a puppy and felt it was no longer safe to let Vernon out of his cage, returned home to us with a whole new vocabulary and a southern accent
  
• who quickly reunited and made up for lost time with his best friend Juneau, and
  
• who, whenever visiting children would ask "Can I hold one of the birds?", was always the one that cooperated.

Now our little pet no longer enjoys the company of his bird friends and almost never sings. But he still likes to come out of the cage, climb up my arm, and rest on my shoulder. So, when we headed north for a long weekend, Vernon rode with us. And we found one more thing that Vernon enjoys - country music - loud!

Great Blue Heron

After a busy week, there's time for some bird watching again ...

Usually if I find such a tiny baby out of the nest box, I assume she has fallen out accidentally and I put her right back in.

But Daddy was keeping her fed and she seemed to be enjoying her freedom, hopping all over the aviary. If I returned her to her nest box, I feared she would just jump right back out to join her much larger clutchmates -- and it's a long way down for a baby who can't yet fly.

Baby flickers

She's not over here...





She's not down there...





I don't see her anywhere!





MOM!!!

Baby wrens

For the third year in a row, a pair of Carolina wrens has nested in the potted Christmas cactus on my deck. She layed 5 eggs, but in this first photo, it was hard to tell how many babies hatched - it just looked like a jumble of body parts.

I took the next photo two days later. Here I could clearly see 3 babies, but suspected that there may be more underneath.

I waited another 2 days and took this photo - all 5 babies, eyes open, mouths open, ready to eat!