Friday, May 9, 2008

The Migration of the baby Killdear

We have had such a fun expirience with the baby killdear birdies that I wanted to share it. The animal kingdom is so amazing and I love that we've been able to see just a little part of it at work. It is a real testimony to me of our Heavenly Father's influence in this world. These little birds are amazing. First of all, the same morning they were born they were just little miniatures of their parents: walking around, eating, flapping their wings. It takes human babies months and months to figure those things out. (Well okay, humans never learn how to flap their wings -ha ha! I meant to learn human things like walking, talking, etc:)) Secondly, the way that the parents interact with these little babies is incredible. They hatched on the morning of the 6th and by that night they had moved from my (ccl) neighbors yard, which is 2 houses away, to our yard by our back fence. The mom and dad would stay by the babies and then they would fly over the fence to the other side and chirp and chirp and chirp to help the babies find their way to the other side and then they would fly back to check the baby birds progress. They repeated this for hours until all four baby birds had made it. At first we weren't sure where they were headed and we just watched these little ones try to find their way into our backyard. Here are two of them by the back fence.
Here is one little bird that got a little bit lost in our grass out front.
Here is another bird that was drinking water from our leaking hose while he waited for his mommy to come and show him the way again.
Here is a close up of one that finally made it through the fence.When they finally made it through I had to go and see it for myself. This little one saw me and started to play dead. That is another amazing thing. The entire time the mamma bird sits on her eggs, if anyone gets too close then the mom will sqwak (is that how you spell that?) her head off and the dad will fly away from the eggs and pretend he has a hurt wing so that you will head over to him instead of the eggs. This is all for protection of the little ones and it is amazing to me that this little bird, one day old, had the same instinct of survival. Awesome! I really thought he was dead, but once I left he ran off to join his family. They were in our backyard for about 2 days doing the same routine as before and trying to get all of the babies over our other fence into the horse field behind our house. The mom would be with the babies and the dad would be on the other side of the fence squawking and then the mom would say "okay little babies, listen to me and daddy squawk and then you can find your way to us." So she would fly over the fence and then all this tweeting would start and then when they couldn't find their way over she would come back and gather them together again and they would start all over. It was so fun to watch. Finally Dave removed some of our fence posts so that they could find their way over. It was an amazing adventure for them and I'm so glad we got to see it all. I even video taped it but I can't figure out how to get my video on this blog site. If anyone knows how will you please tell me. I would appreciate it. Well, that's all on the birds. Sorry if that was boring, but it was a lot of fun to be a part of.

1 comment:

Walters Family said...

That is truly amazing! I would love to see that video. It is so interesting to watch the animal kingdom and their babies. I really enjoyed reading this on your blog. We don't have anything here but bunnies... lizards... and thank heavens I haven't encountered a snake... but what do you expect in Arizona. Oh, we do have quail and those are fun to watch but we don't see a lot where we live... occasionally, but not a lot. Thanks for sharing your experience I found if fascinating.
Becky