And then there were two

Well, as it turns out, Tuesday's bird is NOT full of grace. Tuesday's bird is, instead, somewhat of a klutz. Every few hours today the poor little guy would wind up in the laundry basket underneath the nest, and I would go out and pop him back into the nest:



By this evening, however, he was strong enough that when I lifted him up to his family, he simply ran across their backs and dove out the other side of the lattice and dropped 7 feet or so to the hard pavement below.

I called the wildlife rehabilitator for advice, and she told me that in the wild (as in Not On My Back Porch) a robin would never be able to get a group of 4 babies to maturity. She suggested that I grab 2 and bring them to her.

You can see how crowded the nest was getting. As my friend Deana so poetically put it, it's like a "teacup full of condors":



The reduction was a lot less Sophie's Choice-ish than you might think. The basket bird was an obvious selection, and Fred just reached into the nest and grabbed the one that he could most successfully grab without disturbing everybody else. We took the 2 little guys to the rehabber, and she said they looked great. The nest sure seems a lot more comfortable now: