My Song Sparrow Series - July 4th

Vetch, vetch, and more vetch! My yard is being overtaken by this viney weed. As you can see, it is thick and it covers anything it can climb over - including the rose bush and the rhododendron in my front yard.

On July 4th, my son decided to attack the vetch, for which I was very thankful. Soon he came in to tell me that he'd found a "Robin's nest" when he had pulled the vetch off the rhododendron (which is about 5 ft. tall).

Of course, I had to go out and take a look! I wondered what bird would build a nest so close to the ground?

There it was - with four eggs in it. I could see why he thought it was a robin's nest. The eggs were blue, but they were also spotty. My immediate concern was, "How do we save the nest?" We could find out what kind of bird's nest this was later.

Just a few weeks before that, thanks to my bird blogging friends, I had read an article about what to do if you find a nest that has fallen from it's place. I got a plastic container, poked holes in it, put a piece of paper towel in it and went out to the nest.

The nest was bigger than I thought, so I wasn't sure if this was going to help or not, but I kept working at it. I had some green wire which I used to fix the nest to a rhodie branch very close to where it had been pulled from, and then I wired some of the branches together to form as much of a barrier against the world as I could.

After all of this, I still wondered if the mother bird would come back, and even though I had read that birds aren't sensitive to human smell on nests or babies, I still wondered if she would sit on the nest with all the renovations I had made.

(Tomorrow's post - Did the mother bird come back?)

(All photos taken with Canon Rebel Xsi - o7/04/2010 and 07/20/2010)