A pair of Bewick's Wrens decided to raise a family in our backyard this year. They took up residence in a birdhouse built at a Lowe's Build and Grow Saturday workshop (sadly, no longer being run at Lowe's. Try the Home Depot) and placed in the yard many years ago; ignored by our avian neighbors until now.
The birdhouse has a pivoting roof panel giving easy access to the chamber. Presumably for cleaning, it also makes for an easy way to check on the nest when the parents are out hunting.
In early May, the behavior of the wrens changed, making us suspect that nesting had begin. The female was spending more time in the nest, and the male was bringing her food. On 10 May, we got confirmation, getting a picture of four eggs in the nest. On 13 May, we got a surprise -- there was a fifth egg!
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| 13 May 2018 -- Five eggs! |
Project Nestwatch recommends checking on a nest every three days or so, so that's what we did. I quickly found out that photographing a nest in a birdhouse is more easily done with a cell phone camera than a DSLR. Three days after discovering the fifth egg, we got another surprise: The eggs had hatched.
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| 16 May 2018 -- Hatched. |
With the hatching of the eggs came a change in the parent birds' behavior. Eggs no longer needed incubating. Instead, baby birds needed food. A lot of food. Early on, a parent would stay on the nest a little while to warm the chicks, but as they grew, the chicks were able to keep each other warm. Quite quickly, the parent birds only visited the nest to feed the quickly growing chicks.
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| 19 May 2018 -- Altrical baby birds are all sorts of ugly. |
A few days after hatching, the chicks' feathers were coming in quite nicely.
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| 22 May 2018 -- Feathers coming in, eyes opening. |
A few days after that, they were looking like birds. They also figured out the difference between a parental visit, where they would beg for food, and a visit by a citizen scientist, where they would stay very still in the nest.
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| 25 May 2018 -- Fully aware. |
The nest, and its surroundings, stayed remarkably clean. This is in stark contrast to other nests I've observed.
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| 28 May 2018 -- Outgrowing the nest. |
The nesting period for Bewick's Wrens is about two weeks. As the end of May approached, the chicks started getting antsy in the birdhouse. By the end of May, the chicks were almost the size of an adult Bewick's Wren.
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| 31 May 2018 -- Outgrowing the birdhouse. |
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| 1 June 2018 -- Feed me! |
The morning of 2 June, activity at the birdhouse changed once again. The adult Bewick's Wrens were not making food deliveries, and I could not see any activity in the birdhouse. Through the telescope I was observing the nest with, I could see more ants crawling on the birdhouse that normal, too, so I went out to investigate. Sure enough, the nest was empty. The chicks had fledged.
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| 2 June 2018 -- Fledged! |
As verification, I could hear the chicks calling from the surrounding bushes. And I could see the parent wrens flitting about with food for them.
At the end of the day, we were treated to our first and only sighting of the juvenile wrens outside the nest, clumsily flying around the yard with their parents keeping them in check. They were adorable. They bounded around for a few minutes, occasionally being fed by the parents, until the family left the yard, and entered the big, wide world around them.
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| 2 June 2018 -- Our last sighting of the juvenile wrens. |
I wish them well.
