Empty Nests

My friend Pamela lives in Bedfordshire, England, where she volunteers with the Tree Register of the British Isles, identifying specimen trees around the country.  She and I met onboard the wonderful little cruise ship Explorer (since, tragically gone down to the bottom of the Southern Sea) on our 1999 “expedition” to the Antarctic Peninsula.  Pamela and I and two other English women, from Wiltshire, Angela and Val, formed fast, long-lasting friendships on the high (and I do mean high!) South Atlantic seas.  Birds were a big part of the adventure: gulls, King, Adelie, and other kinds of penguins, the glorious, endangered albatrosses soaring or sitting, large and white and gentle on their hilltop nests. 

Pamela recently wrote me the following sad bird story:

My daughter Anne and her husband bought me a miniature camera last Xmas and we set it up in a nest-box very close to my window - a Blue-tit built its nest (in full view of its 'audience').  She laid 8  eggs and then incubated them for about ten days, being fed by her doting mate. Then the weather turned colder and wetter and stayed like that for most of April.  In the midst of all the very bad weather the babies were born - all 8 survived and we watched and watched as the parents desperately tried to find enough caterpillars.

We put out meal-worms.  We are always told not to interfere, but Nature can be so very cruel.  The parents’ calendar brain told them that day 15 was the day the babies should fledge, so they stopped going into the nest-box, just taunted the babies with food from the hole and the babies just scrambled over each other to try and get something to eat.  They gradually got weaker and weaker, and eventually they succumbed to the cold and the wet and starvation.

My son-in-law came over and we took the little dead babies out; they were so tiny I couldn't believe it. I actually weighed them (there were only 7. I dare not think what happened to number 8, unless he was the strongest and managed to escape).  Anyway, they weighed just one and a half ounces - not one of them  - ALL SEVEN - only weighed that much or, in other words, approximately A QUARTER OF AN OUNCE EACH - all their little feathers were in place and their little eyes had opened.  They are always filming inside nest-boxes on TV, but I’m not sure having these cameras set up is a very good idea.

I’m happy to report a different story: I went out to look yesterday at the tunnel nest in our outdoor shower room, and those baby birds, who had been looking like Pamela’s birds, tiny, feathered, and with open but glazed-looking eyes, were gone!  We had thought we were going to have to clean out that nest ourselves, as Pamela did, but we had a happier ending!  Fledglings!  Hooray!