The Blue Birds Fledge; NOTE this post is PG-13!!! ;-}

We had Blue Birds nest in our back yard bird house this year. We have watched as all four eggs hatched into cute baby blue birds. When we looked out this morning one of them had gotten trapped in our wheelbarrow, so we wen tout to help it back onto the ground on the terrace....and here is how the events happened.

 Stuck in the sun in a black wheel barrow.....

Dan picked him up and he ran through the fence to the trees in the neighbors yard...momma bird and daddy bird followed and fed him.
We thought all was good when I heard flapping coming from the window well, and saw the sliding door screen was open....I knew Tootsie was out.

Sure enough....that cat, the efficient predator had grabbed one of the tree other fledglings in the window well and run under the deck. We felt horrible, we had lost one of the baby birds.
But could save the other two while the cat was distracted with its prey.
This pic is one of the surviving baby's scared but unscaved.

This is the other surviving baby...look at the blue feathers on its tail.

Dan and Carson began the rescue of the two birds left in the window well.

Momma Blue bird sat and watched as we tried to save her remaining fledglings.

Gunny sat and supervised the action from his favorite place on the steps.

Finally both of the baby's from the window well are safe in the crawdad trap. Then I took them up so that they could hide from the cat in the tall grass and their parents could feed them.

Its hard to see them, but they made their way across to the neighbors yard and got the grubs that mommy and daddy bird had for them, and rejoined the first little guy we helped out of the wheel barrow. As sad as it is that Tootsie got one of the four, had he not we wouldn't have known about the ones in the window well, and he might have feasted on all tree later in the day.

In college I worked on a project that looked at the affects of domestic cats on song birds. We found that the cats are not only very efficient hunters, but that they kill more song birds each year than any other predator. As for our 19 year old cat, he helped this family of blue birds become yet another statistic of this, and is proof, no cat is to old to predate on the birds.....
DANG CAT!!!!!

Till next time........