Thursday, October 15, 2009

Deadbeat parents... dead babies

I think my finches are completely retarded when it comes to having babies and keeping them alive.

The same pair of Zebra Finches that layed bogus eggs a while back finally layed some more eggs right before I went away for Folsom. I was psyched and couldn't wait to get home to see if there would be little baby finches waiting for me.

When I got home I found two little, live, baby birds in the nest. AWESOME!!!

Not so awesome.

Seems the parents got tired of taking care of them and moved out of the nest into another one completely abandoning them. Ugh.

I searched the internet for what I should do and, basically, there was nothing. It is almost impossible to hand feed baby finches without accidentally killing them.

So I spent the next few days talking to the parent finches and trying to pursuade them to go feed their little babies. I guess I'm no St. Francis of Assissi because the deadbeat birds paid no attention. The babies got weaker and weaker, and the first one died. The next day the second one died. (It's the one in the photo above.) It's sad, but it's natural. You can't be mad at them for not being able to take care of their babies yet. They are young and learning.

I ripped apart the nest and left the materials on the floor and the neglectful parents started to rummage through them and use the pieces to build a new nest at their new homesite. Maybe third time's a charm.

8 comments:

Leatherpigboy said...

OMG how very sad my little hart actually broke when i read this. Like you said its nature and how things go but still so sad, hell i get sad when i kill a plant! Oh dont tell anyone that by the way dont want everyone to think im some puss! :)

Stan said...

Appartently that's common in nature. So much beauty in the natural world but there's that other side too. I tried to save an abandoned baby bird in my backyard a few summers ago to no avail and had to watch it slowly die too.

wdavi said...

Sorry to hear that. I'm curious to know though, will the parents engage in the same kind of behavior if they have another cutch of eggs?

Jambrea said...

How sad. :(

Plain Gay Blogging said...

I hear it's next to impossible to breed these little birds in captivity, so don't feel bad

Sue said...

Poor little baby birdie. I sure hope they are learning from their mistakes.

Paul said...

You're amazing. I just wrote this up on The Sword.

Nick Moretti said...

Paul...
The drinks are on ME when I'm out in San Francisco next week. ;-)