The birds and the.......

Every spring we are fortunate enough to have robins that nest in our swing set. It's very exciting for the kids to watch and they look forward to it every year. It's been a really great learning experience for the kids because we have always looked up answers to questions like "how long does it take for the eggs to hatch", etc. Recently we've had some beautiful weather with temps in the 60's. The kids have spent a lot of time outdoors and have been watching a pair of robins that seem to have their eye on a spot in a tree in our front yard.

This morning the kids and I walked to school. It definitely must be mating season for the birds because we passed 3 nests within 5 minutes. Kaeli began telling me every detail about the robins that have been spending a lot of time in our tree. Then she hit me with "And we even got to see them mating!". This caused a moment of panic in me because that could definitely lead to a lot more questions. I was aready formulating my responses to those potential questions when Kaeli follows up her statement with "Yeah......I think we saw the mom and dad when they first met and decided to live together forever". WHEW!!!!! (wiping sweat from my brow)

Don't you just love the innocence of a child?

I'm hoping we get a family in the swing set again this year. The first year it happened we were worried about the choice the bird made and feared for her safety (we had an outdoor cat then). We took the nest down and put it in the garbage. The very next day the nest was back in the same spot. That poor mama bird had worked double time to get her nest done again. That's when we learned not to fight nature. It also taught me what a wonderful experience it is to have a nest so accessible. The nest is always in a little eve of the playhouse portion of the swing set. The kids are able to climb up in the playhouse and peer right into the nest. They look forward to checking the nest everyday to see if the there are any eggs. Then, they look forward to the the hatching. Once the eggs are laid I try to limit the amount of time the kids spend in the backyard because I know mama bird need lots of time for incubating. Then after the babies hatch she needs to be able to feed them. There have been times that the kids have been outside playing and the mama watches us from a distance--chirping and giving us lots of warning signals with a little worm hanging out of her beak. We always rush inside and watch from the window as she feeds her babies. One year we were even lucky enough to watch as the mama helped one of her babies learn to fly. Of course, the kids have also seen the unfortunate event of a baby's death. He was so close to the age of leaving the nest. We don't know what happened to him, he looked perfect.

So, this year I'm hoping that I can get pictures of each stage and journal it in my blog.
Wish us luck!

By the way, I have learned that it is a myth that the mama will abandon her nest if it's touched by humans. The kids know not to touch the nest, but it does make me feel better that if they "accidentally" touch it we aren't sentencing those babies to death. We did have a mishap one year when a friend came over and her son picked up an egg and accidentally crushed it in his hands. That was slightly traumatic for my kids. It was an interesting learning experience, though. The next day the shell and liquid had been completely removed from the nest.