Time for lunch

Time for a bit of levity.  Cormorants and turtles taking the sun at the 59th street lake while the egret is on the prowl for lunch. The anatomy of the egret ranges from elegant, graceful to goofy.

How far can the neck stretch?

Bingo!  Got something. "Spear fishing".

Down the hatch

The reflection makes the neck look like a grinding machine.

Now the cormorants are interested. If there are fish they want their share.

To be continued.
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Time for contemplation

10am this morning, both parents calling, searching for baby. Food delivery. They were checking ground, branches, tree tops. I watched this for 90 minutes.

My neighbor sent me an e-mail, that she had found the baby at 8:30am, dead, not far from the tree where it hunkered down most of yesterday.  Baby was alive after the rain stopped last night looking shaky, so sometime between 7:45pm and this morning something catastrophic happened.  I suspect it was stepped on. It had not yet mastered flight.  This space is the dog walking area, wood chips on ground, impossible to see a tiny bird at dusk.  I brought baby upstairs to take final pictures. There were a few ants running out of the feathers. They're dead now too! Little body in rigor, so it had been dead for a while.  The only sign of trauma was spec of blood on head.

Baby has now been properly interred in a shroud.    I've been outside, 2:30pm.  Parents still searching for their child in a wider  space. They're such wonderful parents. I don't know if they understand death, but they do know parental love.  I hope they try for another brood in the back garden where humans don't trod.
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Fledged!

I came down in the morning to find several frantic neighbors. Baby cardinal sitting on sidewalk.  Oh no!!!  The baby fledged from nest above path, but didn't flap enough to get into neighboring tree. It obviously fluttered down to sidewalk. Alive, thank goodness, but staying on sidewalk was not an option, so I gave my neighbor my camera and very gently picked up totally calm baby from path and placed it on a tree knot.  The parents saw the baby so that wasn't a concern, but I noticed immediately that there were ants from the tree getting onto the baby, so I gently transferred baby to a horizontal branch on another tree and the baby fell asleep. With nothing else to be done I headed to the park figuring that when I came home there would either be a dead baby or a live baby.

Two hours later.    Baby had flown down from the horizontal branch it had gotten to the base of another tree and was  doing proper baby cardinal stuff. A baby cardinal is so ugly that it's adorable. You can't not love the facial expressions.

Time to be a "mountain" climber.

Parents very alert to baby's safety.

Would you feed a baby who sticks a tongue out at you?

A stretch is a great opportunity to see the anatomy of the baby.

A couple of times the feeding was nest position, from above.

The parents were flying from ground to branch obviously trying to get the baby to fly UP. This went on for at least an hour, down-up, down-up.  The best the baby did was run-hop-fall on face.  It had flown down from nest, down from branch, but has yet to do UP.

I don't know what I'll find later today. Usually when the new fledge is a grounder it gets the up talent the next day. It takes a lot to get yourself into the air, the thrust and when you're out in the big new world less than 24 hours there's a lot to be learned.  I was worried that having carried the baby it might imprint on me, but it obviously knows its parents and they know the baby. I suspect this was a one baby hatch, because both parents never left the baby. There's lots of food in the garden...  insects, things people drop, and the cranberries I deliver.
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