Birdy

always clear the edge and the outside of the nest is covered with bird droppings. There’s so much crap I change the paper under the nest every day.
    About half way into the third week, this little yellow female starts climbing up on the rampart of the nest to get a breath of fresh air and look around. I can see she’s going to be the same sort of curioustype as Birdie. She’s just a little over two weeks old when she falls out the first time. This means she falls about eight times her own height to the bottom of the cage. There are practically no feathers on her wings, so it’s a free fall. It’s like me falling off the top of our house. Weight or density has a lot to do with falling. Baby birds even fall out of trees and survive.
    I don’t see her fall but I look in and there she is, trying to stand on the flat surface at the bottom of the cage. Alfonso is hopping around in total confusion. He feeds her and there’s nothing else he can do. Birdie peers down over the edge of the nest. That baby bird’ll freeze if she has to stay out there all night. She doesn’t have enough feathers.
    I reach in, pick her up and put her back in the nest. She has virtually no feathers along her breast or along her thighs. Also her head is very thinly feathered. She snuggles back into the nest with the others and I think that’s the end of it.
    The next day I come home from school and she’s on the floor again. Alfonso and Birdie are frantic. I have the feeling she’s been out quite a while. When I pick her up she feels cool. I hold her in my hand to warm her, then put her back in the nest and hope for the best. Birdie feeds all of them and when I go down to dinner, everything seems in order.
    After dinner, she’s out of the nest again. I put her back in and wonder what I can do. I watch to see what’s happening. Birdie might’ve taken a dislike to her and is throwing her out, or maybe feels that since she left the nest voluntarily, she shouldn’t be allowed back in. Who knows what goes through a canary’s mind? In about an hour, the yellow one’s climbed up on the rampart. She looks over the edge and out into the aviary where Alfonso is flying. She stands up on her thin, bare-thighed legs and flaps her slightly feathered stubs of wings. She tumbles forward and almost off the nest. In about two minutes she does the same thing again and falls. The only solution is to make sure she’s in the nest before I turn out the lights.
    During the next week, all of them start standing on the edge of the nest. It becomes the thing to do. You can see they’re preparingthemselves for flight. There’s much stretching of wings; they stand up high, stretch straight out and flap their wing stumps at faster than flight speeds. I wonder if they’re getting any lift from this flapping. I try it myself with my own arms as fast as I can but I can’t feel anything. You have to have feathers. I feel if I could only flap down without having to flap up again, I’d definitely get some lift. When I went off the gas tank, it was mostly falling.
    By the end of three weeks they’re all standing on the edge of the nest, even at night, and Birdie isn’t sitting them anymore. She’s beginning to carry around pieces of burlap so I put in a new nest on the other side of the cage. Between feedings now, she begins to build again. Alfonso is more and more the main feeder of the babies. They’ve started mating again, too, and I figure it won’t be long before Birdie lays another batch of eggs.
    Twice, Birdie comes over and snitches soft feathers from one or another of the babies. I’ve read how sometimes a female will pluck a whole nest of young naked to feather her new nest. This can cause all the babies to die from pain and cold. This is another one of those things that happens because canaries have been in cages so long. I wonder if it ever happens with wild birds.
    The third time Birdie comes over to take a pass at one of the young for some soft down to line the new nest, Alfonso pounces on her and chases her out into the aviary. She comes back twice more and each time it’s Alfonso to the rescue. For the next few days he sits beside the nest on guard. There are so many things that can go wrong.
    Finally, Birdie is finished with her new nest. In the meantime, I’ve had great fun watching the young make their first flights. The yellow female keeps falling out till she’s figured it by trial and error. I begin to think she likes falling.