New Neighbors

For Christmas last year, my dad sent us a beautiful heart-shaped wreath made of natural ingredients like eucalyptus, dried flowers, and sticks. The colors are red, white, and blue so it’s useful year round. I’ve had it on the front door since Christmas and I absolutely love it! Some of the flower colors have faded a little, but it still looks beautiful.

Well, a few weeks ago I noticed some new sticks right in the corner of the heart. Although they were really more like small twigs. It appeared that a bird had found a place for its nest! No big deal, I thought. We don’t actually use our front door a lot since it’s right next to the garage and we typically go out through the garage. So I watched the nest steadily grow over the next few days and listened to the birds happily chirping right outside the door. Then one day I noticed that the nest looked complete so my curious self decided to take a closer look. Much to my surprise, I found a light blue speckled egg inside!

I then watched the nest closely for the next few days. Mama bird sat in her nest chirping away and papa bird (presumably) sat on the corner of the house watching over her. Day after day they were there, chirping back and forth to each other and each day, there was a new egg until we got to a final total of 5. (I missed getting a picture of the day there were 3 since I was gone most of the day).

After looking all over the Internet and in a book of local birds, I’ve decided the birds are house finches. The last egg appeared a bit over a week ago and according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, they have an incubation period of 13 to 14 days and a nesting period of 12-19 days. My best guess is that the first egg was laid about 2 weeks ago. If that’s true then we should start seeing babies in the next few days. We’ve been careful to not approach the nest unless the mother is already gone and especially careful not to touch anything. The nest is high enough up on the door that only other birds would be able to reach it. I really hope that I’ll be able to get pictures of the birds, but I don’t want to scare mama bird away from the nest so I’ll have to be careful. In the meantime, we just enjoy listening to the birds in the morning and we’ll just have to wait and see what happens!