Rob's Rants

About two weeks after the initial discovery, our cardinal eggs have hatched and 4 hungry baby birds are chirping away waiting for food. Here’s the view from above:

4 Hungry Babies

I wouldn’t say that I’m a fanatical organic gardener, but I do use very few chemicals, and usually use organic ones when I do. I’ve always thought that the sign of a healthy yard isn’t an unbroken expanse of dense, almost fake looking turf, but a nice diversity of life — birds, squirrels, worms, and fuzzy little animals all living happily.

Since we moved into this house, we’ve had a constant stream of wildlife using our yard. For several years now, a family of robins has nested and raised their young in a next under the eave of our garage. There must have been a dozen new birds that have come from that nest. A couple of years ago I was working in my vegetable garden and I stepped on something under the mulch that squeaked. Turned out to be a nest of young rabbits that couldn’t have been more than a couple of days old. I covered them back up and tracked their progress every few days. A few weeks later 4 brand new bunnies hopped off to the woods.

We’ve had house wrens, finches, robins, and rabbits all call our yard home. This year’s new addition is a nest of cardinals. They seem to have made a home in an azalea in our back yard. We’ll keep taking pictures for the next couple of weeks as the young birds develop.

Here’s the nest today:

4 Eggs in a nest.