Watching the babies!

[Anyanka]

I'm all excited and maternal: my garden is full of babies - sparrows and blackbirds. We've got to keep the dogs indoors, as the sparrow babies are practising flying today, and they get awfully close to the ground. It's cute as anything, their wings going with tiny fast little strokes, all wobbly. A pair of them were flying back and forth between my apple tree and quince, obviously just for practice. They also sit right next to the birdfeeder and demand beakfeeding from their poor little mother (I'm empathising).

One of the hounds nearly caught a young blackbird that had got trapped in the greenhouse this morning, but I managed to intervene in time. Earlier this week the same dog unfortunately caught a baby blackbird that was under attack by a pair of magpies. All in all the dogs do more good than harm to the birds, though - none of the many neighbourhood cats dare set paw on our piece of land!

[hobble]

That's great, I love seeing the fledgelings.
We have baby robins and baby chaffinches at the moment.
My friends two tawny babies fledges yesterday, bet they are all getting a bit wet today.

[demicav]

It's great seeing all the babies, I love this time of the year.

[guineapig]

I have my second lot of baby blackbirds still in the nest and the great tit babies left the nest today. Unfortunately one of them was found by the cat before it got airborne

[Anyanka]

Now the young starlings have taken over. They're mostly pedestrian, waddling around on the lawn, harrassing their poor mothers for food. I got nothing done yesterday because I kept watching them and the little sparrows.

It was pointed out to me today that the correct term is 'chicks'. But to me, they're babies. MY babies!

[witham]

I'm just the same,we've got baby House Sparrows, Starlings, Robins,Chaffinches, Greenfinches (I think) they and the little Chaffinches seem so much alike, the Blackbirds are on their second sitting with the teenage fledglings still comming to them on the lawn and we have a third pair nesting in the garage along with another pair of Robins, apart from all the ones nesting in the trees and hedges around the garden we have Great Tits feeding babs in a hole in the twisted trunk of a very old Hawthorn tree where all the shoots have fused together over a period of time and Blue Tits doing the same in another one, The Tree Sparrows must have young as they are back and forth to the feeders all the time and the Wren who is sitting in a nest between two bales of hay must have littlies any day now fingers x Not seen any Dunnock fledglings yet but they also are very busy under the feeders