Sigh.

This morning when I got up, the nest looked like this:



I ran downstairs and out the door that we try not to open, and there was one tiny baby bird, hiding under my barbecue. I couldn't decide whether to put him back in the nest or not, and went inside and asked Google-the-birder what I should do. Fledging is still 4 or 5 days away - unlikely that the parents had booted it out, especially as there were no less than FOUR robins diving at me and piping! I guess they can call in reinforcements when it gets bad?

I started combing through the streaming video archives from last night and found it - a great big ugly crow showed up at 6 this morning, when there were three babies in the nest. All the camera shows is black feathers but it is clear that the robins ran it off, but by the time it left, there were only two babies in the nest. Google-the-scientist tells me that you can indeed touch baby birds because birds don't have a sense of smell, and as long as the baby you return to the nest is warm, the parents will still feed it.



So that's what we did. You'll notice the baby doesn't move one single muscle after it gets returned to the nest. It took him (?) at least half an hour, but he is feeding with the rest of them now, and has settled right in. A was careful to make sure he was warm before he went back. I'm still looking through last night's archives to see if I can figure out where the fourth baby went.

Edited to add: Oh dear. I wish I hadn't done that. Three hours after the last video started, a big old crow came and found our nest and plucked a baby out of it. It took mere seconds for the crow to land, grab a bird, and leave. They really are obscenely large, next to these wee nestlings. There was no fight - the parents must have been off looking for food at the time.