07 June 2014

Baby Robins!

There is a robin's nest in our backyard, safely nestled on a drainpipe off of our garage.


Curious as to whether or not there were any eggs in the nest, I waited until the robin flew away, and sneakily lifted up my phone to take a photo.


Result! How gorgeous is that color? I always thought robin eggs were a lighter blue; I'm digging the turquoise.
I told Sam and Ben that there would soon be baby robins in our nest, and every day when their shrieking scared the robin away I would use my phone to take a photo of the nest so I could see if the eggs had hatched.
One day, my photo looked like this:



Baby robins! Incredibly nasty looking baby robins, but still cool! 
We pulled the ladder out of the garage and let Sam climb up to take a look. He concurred that they looked disgusting, but he still wanted to look at them over and over again. Ben was too short to see the robins, even on the ladder, but he looked at the photos on my phone and got excited. Now when he comes out to the backyard he runs right to the garage yelling "baby wobins! baby wobins!"


The babies have feathers now, so they are much nicer to look at. They are very vocal when their parents come to feed them, which I love. I feel a special kinship with the mother robin, because I too know what it's like when your offspring won't shut up during dinnertime.
According to Wikipedia, the baby robins will leave the nest two weeks after hatching, which doesn't leave us much more time with them. The Wiki also says that the mother robin will build a new nest for her next brood, so I'll be keeping an eye out for it. We'll miss our baby robins!

The Latin name for the American robin is Turdus migratorius, which was too funny not to share. Here's hoping none of the robins leave any turdus migratoriuses on our heads while we're outside.