Wednesday 25 March 2015

Spring Into Summer

Mother Nature has definitely been playing a strange game this past year.
We have just moved into Autumn (Fall) here in Australia, after a Summer that wasn't as "Summery" as expected. It was more Spring like.

Flowers were blooming when they shouldn't have been, new growth was sprouting on trees and babies were being born!

We were lucky enough to have a new family created in a Bottlebrush tree in our front yard and I was lucky enough to have a decent camera to document it all.

My husband called out to me one afternoon and asked me to bring the camera. What greeted me, once I got out there, was a nest with 3 eggs sitting in it, tucked neatly into the tree.



The adult birds were never far from the nest and kept watch from a distance whenever we were outside, but it seemed they trusted us, and we never touched them.

Investigation showed that the birds were Noisy Minahs - they definitely live up their names too!
For more information and to listen to how loud they can be, there is a great wikipedia article. 



We watched the nest every day. The older birds would come and play tag at sitting on the nest. About a week later, we were greeted with these:


Sadly, one of the babies didn't survive. We had a major thunderstorm and I think it was just too much for it. One of the eggs took longer to hatch than the others, and we're guessing that the one that passed away, was the "runt" of the litter.

As the days wore on, they got larger, and noisier!



Finally, about 3 weeks after they first hatched, they started to resemble the birds that they would become, full-feathered and ready to venture away from the nest


Finally, they decided it was time to move on and they left the nest. The empty nest is still sitting in the tree, waiting to see if we have another family move in, sometime in the near future.