I’ve spent many hours during the last month taking pictures of two Baltimore Oriole nests. I’ve monitored the behaviors of the mother, the father, and the babies. I’ve learned a little and speculated a lot. And my psyche has been tweaked.
I look at the image above and I don’t know if the look in the mother’s eye is dumb instinct or a multi-tasking intelligence that hunts, feeds, protects, monitors, instructs, and prepares her hatchlings for their world.
I watch the fathers, not a dead-beat dad to be found, hustling to and from the nest, sharing equal responsibility to feed and care for the young.
There are times the mother sounds a trill for two to three minutes before she approaches the nest. The young stay perfectly still, no tell-tale jiggle of the nest giving away their whereabouts.
Then, another call from her or the father and all babes pop up, and make a racket as they open their hungry beaks and vie for the treats the parent has lined up in his or her beak. I can’t tell yet the pecking order – who gets fed first – the strongest, or the weakest, the loudest or the quietest.
There is a system or a favoritism or a readiness factor, that causes some one-on-one attention. In the image above, why is this little one the only one to be indulged with the mother’s attention? Is this a lesson or a feeding?
Perhaps it’s my imagination, but the young seem to display more enthusiasm when their father arrives to feed them. Perhaps he brings them sweeter treats while the mother keeps their food nutritious.
In the photo above, the little ones wings are seen, showing that the time for leaving the nest is coming soon. I have come to see this week that survival is hardly guaranteed. This photo was taken sometime in the last two days. This evening, one of the fledglings from this nest lay dead on the ground, while a baby Robin lies dead in the flowerbed outside my front door.
Such care is given to baby birds. During prime feeding season (which seems to go on for two weeks for the Baltimore Oriole based on my observation this June), the mother and father frequent the nest with food every six to ten minutes. Sometimes both parents arrive, back to back.
My grandmother’s mother left her and her father when she was seven. My grandmother, a bird lover, would observe the behavior I describe here, and her whole life long would ask, “Even a mother bird returns to the nest. Why did my mother never come back for me?” 
Parenting is busy work, tiring work, non-stop work. I puzzled for two weeks wondering why I often saw a male leave the nest with something in his beak – as is evident in the photo above, as the bird flies away from the nest which hangs in the upper right of the photo. A neighbor tells me that the father is removing droppings from the nest.
Nature is harsh. My affection for the little loud mouth that first brought my attention to the nest from which the images in this post were taken, is very likely the little dead bird that lay lifeless on the ground at my feet today. Was it not ready for the world? Did it not quite have its wings? Did it simply fall out too soon – a fall caused by it own over-exuberance when the parents arrived? Or did a predator take it from the nest and drop it as the parents came to its rescue?
Thoughts of life and death, beauty, fragility, hostility, love, attentiveness – fill my mind.
SilverLining 