Baby Robins Soon!
July 6th, 2010
I think it was the weekend before the holiday weekend, or about 12 days ago, when Pete and I noticed that a robin was busily building a nest in our sumac next to the patio. She was picking up dried grass from the neighbor’s freshly mowed lawn and also bringing some “muck” from the gutter. In no time at all she had settled into her nest.
Luckily the nest is on the opposite side of the tree away from the patio and over our neighbor’s lawn so she doesn’t seem to mind when we’re on the patio peering at her through the branches.
Pete has checked the nest a couple times when she has flown away, partly because we wanted to make sure there were no unwanted eggs in the nest from a parasitic bird such as the cowbird who surreptitiously lays its eggs in others’ nests, leaving the host bird to incubate the cowbird eggs.
There’s no mistaking whose eggs these belong to:
Robin’s eggs take about 12-14 days to hatch. I’m not sure when all the eggs were laid, but I think we should have three baby robins any day now—definitely before the weekend.
2 Responses to “Baby Robins Soon!”
Robin July 6th, 2010 at 12:10 pm #
How fun! It seems really late for robin’s eggs though. Our baby robin’s all fledged in mid-May. On a side note robins are one of the few birds that can recognize their own eggs from cowbird eggs and will knock out the foreign egg from their nest. We had a cowbird problem last year:
http://threeacres.wordpress.com/2008/06/12/were-not-the-only-ones-nesting/
denise July 7th, 2010 at 2:16 pm #
Robin: I can’t believe how many nests you had on your property (although it’s much much bigger than ours!)–I forgot that I had read about the cowbirds on your blog. Last summer I saw a male cardinal feeding a fledgling cowbird who was trying to cheep like a cardinal though, so they must have hatched and raised it.
I thought it was rather late for robin’s eggs too. Maybe she’s just a late bloomer.