Becca's Blog

We leave for 24 hours, and look what happens.

Gone. Left the building. Decamped. Changed domiciles. However, at least one of them was hanging out in the backyard, still adjusting to how the wings work.

Another dispatch from the nest

I expect these guys to fledge next week. We might return from Santa Cruz on Sunday afternoon to see them up and stretching their wings.

What a difference a week makes.

Mom doesn't fit on the nest anymore.

(That's one of the babies, not the mom, and the other one is in there--just obscured by the leaves.)

A sneak peek

...into the nest.






So far, so good. They appear to be getting bigger by the day.

Our newest neighbor.

I blogged about a hummingbird nest under our eaves last summer, and I wondered if we'd have a nest again this year.  Very surprisingly, this year the nest is right off our front porch, at eye level from the front door. She doesn't seem to mind our comings and goings--she doesn't startle when we walk by.

There's at least one egg in the nest, probably two. If I set up a tripod inside our front window, I should be able to get some pretty good  shots of the babies when they hatch.

I did see the mom get nervous when another hummingbird came near. I think the adult males might see the chicks as competition for food sources (like the feeder a few feet away from the nest). Last year after the chicks left the nest, they lighted in a tree in our backyard, and an adult male dive-bombed them. One went torpid and flipped upside down on his branch. It was scary, but the chick recovered quickly. I like to think that clutch still hangs around the yard.

Baby Barn Owls ...

in Berkeley.  We discovered a pair in our neighborhood last night. They're white and fuzzy and noisy as hell. Unfortunately, I couldn't get a decent picture of them. I have learned, though, that at this stage they're called "branchers."

Out of the nest, but ...

not quite ready to fly the coop.

It's all begun.

The in-law onslaught starts within the hour (Jane is at the airport picking up SIL #2); the hummingbird flying of the coop has begun; the photo and video testing has started. I have a sinus headache.

The tenants.

Taken through a dirty screen with no flash and full zoom--and standing on the toilet bracing my elbow against the window frame. Considering, I think it came out pretty decently. These two are going to leave mom without so much as a thank you in a couple of days, I can tell by the way they're fidgeting around, stretching, and practically popping out of the nest.

On the DL: My left thumb.

I thought I needed the tip of my thumb for knitting, but it turns out that I can hold it out of the way and still get yarn around needles (I'm not so sure this would work with continental style). I've found this out because on Monday night I was going to town putting vinyl tile down in the utility room and cut myself with a sharp new linoleum knife while trying to trim down an odd-sized piece. This is (hopefully) the conclusion of the new-floor project that was begun late last summer, after Orange Boy polluted the ratty old parquet floor. It's far from perfectly installed, but it looks better than what was there before.

In other domestic news, we have a hummingbird family living under our roof, we're about to have a big influx of in-laws, and I'm drugging my cat.

There's a pair of nestlings in a hummingbird nest under the eaves next to our bathroom window, so we have an OK, albeit backlit, view of the nest. We've been watching the mom for about three weeks, and about a week ago we saw two small, pointy beaks poking out of the nest. They're getting bigger by the day, and sometimes we see the mom feeding them. Unfortunately, the nest is in a terrible location to photograph, so I'm not likely to get any decent pictures. I did take pictures of fledging hummingbirds in our magnolia tree several years ago, but they're analog. I was a mushy, soppy, weepy mess the day those babies left the nest--you'd have thought I brooded them myself.

The imminent arrival of houseguests is kind of a kick in the pants to finish a few house projects, like the floor.  The in-laws will be in town because one of Jane's nieces is graduating from college in a couple of weeks, and another niece is attending her college orientation. Various family members will be staying with us for varying numbers of nights, and we'll be spending a night in the South Bay to make sure we arrive at the graduation birght and early. Can you tell that I'm excited?

And yes, I made good on my promise to start the cranky old man on Prozac. Now he gets a quarter of a human pill every evening and he seems a bit less cranky. We don't think he's sprayed since, but all of his favorite spots are still inaccessible to him most of the time, so it's hard to say the drugs are doing the trick. You don't know what fun is until you try jamming a tiny, crumbly, bitter-tasting pill fragment down a cat's gullet. One side effect is that he seems to hate me less. He doesn't scream at me as much and he's back to sitting on my lap or perching next to me on the couch. Which is nice, because I kind of missed his hairy, dandruffy ass.