Picture a little love nest...

Picture a little love nest, 

Down where the roses cling,

Picture that same sweet love nest,

See what a year can bring...

from, Makin' Whoppee
by Donaldson and Kahn

The chickadee parents are busy from morning to dusk feeding their babies, and trust me, that is a long shift this time of year in Seattle.  The clamor in the box has gone from that newborn, high-pitched whining to loud, greedy demands for food. Teenagers.

Mom and dad bring them a assortment of juicy insects and then come out of  the box each time with a lump of poop that they carry away and drop someplace else.  Cleanliness is next to godliness.  Actually, keeping their front yard perfectly clean is another way to fool the roaming riff-raff.  

My respect for their "birdie smarts" increases. Perhaps the silly box wasn't such a bad choice after all.  I worry about crows (having once seen them clean out a robin's nest here, a sad and traumatic thing) but I've never seen a crow on the ground in that part of our garden; they are not interested in bees and flowers.

And the chickadees seem to trust me.  I get a good scolding when I walk by, but I tell them to simmer down, and they get back to work.  I took a chair out the other evening after dinner and watched for a while.  The forays for food come in about 10 minute intervals, and the babies are smart enough to keep their mouths shut when they are home alone. The box is perfectly quiet, even if you accidentally on purpose touch it. They know the sound of their parent's feet on the roof.

The most critical time is coming.  There is nothing more irresistible to predators than the clumsy fluffing around of fledglings.  Over the years I've seen my own cats transform into deranged, wild, yowling things at the sound of a baby bird in a bush.  Vino is long gone, and there are a couple of cats who occasionally walk through here, but I'm glad fewer people let their cats outside.  I suspect this is because they are so precious to their owners, not out of any particular concern for birds. 

A study made headlines recently, claiming that cats kill a around 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion mammals a year, many more than once thought.  Cat lovers argue that this is "natural behavior," but of course there's nothing "natural" about 20 cats living in one city block.

From the New York Times:

"The estimated kill rates are two to four times higher than mortality figures previously bandied about, and position the domestic cat as one of the single greatest human-linked threats to wildlife in the nation. More birds and mammals die at the mouths of cats, the report said, than from automobile strikes, pesticides and poisons, collisions with skyscrapers and windmills and other so-called anthropogenic causes."