Birdy

it on themselves accidentally while jumping around Alfonso when he’s eating. They’re hopping in and out of the dish full of egg food and then, more by chance than anything, discover they can go directly to the source. This is a critical moment. I decide to leave the door of the breeding cage open and watch what happens.
    As soon as it’s open, of course, Alfonso takes off out into the aviary. He’s been locked in with those babies for five days and is showing signs of going stir crazy. He flies about madly, checkingall his systems and giving the old wings a workout. It’s almost as much fun for me watching him through the binoculars as it must be for him. It isn’t long before the little yellow bird who kept falling out of the nest is on the edge of the cage door looking into the aviary. I can almost feel her mind trying to work it out. There’s a perch in front of her and slightly down, about twice as far as she’s ever jumped before. She cocks her head this way and that trying to figure the distance. Birds don’t have stereoscopic vision, and have some difficulty judging distances. She takes off for it after about three minutes pondering and makes a perfect landing. Now, she really looks little. Alfonso, almost as if he’s rewarding her, comes over and feeds her.
    It’s exciting, for me watching, as each of the young birds comes out into the aviary. At first, each flight from one perch to another is a major adventure, there’s lots of falling and fluttering to the bottom. Once they’re on the bottom, it’s a major project flying back up to the lowest perch. This perch is at least two feet from the ground. They all work it out though and in a few days are making experimental test flights. They seem to enjoy fluttering down from one perch to a lower one, more than struggling their way up. It’s a couple of weeks before they catch onto gliding.
    This is the opposite of the way I’ll have to do it. From what I know now, I think I’ll have to be satisfied with gliding first, then work my way to some kind of flapping.
    It’s several days after they’ve left the breeding cage before one of them, the dark one, finds his way back. Birdie has finished laying her fifth egg again and I’ve put all the eggs in the nest. These days, Alfonso has been able to fly into the cage from the aviary and feed Birdie or sit on the eggs when she wants to go out to feed or take some exercise. Now, this young bird comes over to the nest and starts giving the feed-me signal. Birdie hunches down deeper on the nest and ignores him. I’m wondering if I’ll have to lock Birdie in the breeding cage, leaving Alfonso out, something I’d hate to do. Then Alfonso takes care of things himself. It’s almost as if he’d figured it out.
    He flies into the breeding cage and chases that baby bird out.When the baby, all confused at this hostile act from the ever-loving father, is outside, Alfonso feeds him. In this way, he trains all the young birds to stay away from Birdie on the nest.
    But it’s no real problem. They’re all beginning to have such fun flying, they don’t do much of anything but eat and fly all day long. They practice different flying tricks. Now, I’m sure they’re watching Alfonso to learn how to do some things. It would be interesting to see how quickly a bird would learn to fly if it never saw any other bird flying. I decide to try that one out when I have enough birds.
    I’m keeping a notebook of all the things I see. I’m doing a lot of drawings and I write down my observations and thoughts. I’m also writing down all the different experiments I want to try so I can figure out what flying is and how birds learn. I take ten pages of notes alone on how a bird learns to turn around on a perch. It’s definitely something they have to practice; they don’t know how to do it for almost a week after they’re out of the nest. Out in the back yard I’m working on that trick myself and it is not an easy thing to learn.
    Birdie seems happy and well. She’s extraordinary, laying a second clutch of five eggs. The book says a female can have three nests a year without hurting, if she’s in good health. Birdie looks fine to me and as the young birds get more and more independent with their feeding, Alfonso gives her more help. He brings food up to feed her on the nest and sits when she flies out to eat. She takes long exercise periods, completely ignoring the baby birds; they ignore her too. It seems that