First Fledglings!

Over the past two or three days, I have heard the kind of distinctive chatter and witnessed behavior that, thanks to my baby bird volunteer experience at Tri-State Bird Rescue, I recognize as fledglings. Fledglings are baby birds that have left the nest. Before the baby fledges, it's known as a chick.

Fledglings can fly before they can feed themselves, so they don't venture too far from their nests and make a racket trying to get their parents' attention to feed them. And much like human babies cry quite loudly when they are hungry, so do fledglings until they are fed!

The first 2025 fledgling activity I saw was at the bird feeder I have placed outside our dining room window, at the front of the house. It is placed there strategically, so our cats can sit on a chair by the window and get their bird fix. In addition to the loud, incessant, high-pitched chirping, I saw other common tell-tale fledgling behaviors: wing fluttering and beak a-gaping. It took me only a glance to identify the bird as House Sparrow fledgling since there was a male House Sparrow feeding it. As the dad scrambled to ingest a bit of food in its beak, the baby fledgling chirped and shook in what seems like starving anticipation. Despite dad getting bits of food into baby's beak, baby seems insatiable, chirping and fluttering and shaking nonstop.

That's because it kind of is insatiable! Chicks and fledglings need to be fed continuously from dawn to dusk, every 10 to 20 minutes depending on the species. And that their brood has begun to fledge only makes things more complicated for mom and dad bird. That's because while the chicks are all in the nest, the parents (or sometimes just one parent) can simply leave the nest and bring back the food. But if the parents have a brood of more than one chick, once they begin fledgling, the parents have to divide their attention between their chicks in the nest and their fledglings, wherever they may be! Some birds have five or six babies per clatch!! Imagine chasing down six little humans every 10 minutes to feed them where they are but they're all in different backyards! I can't even imagine how exhausted these bird parents must be! 😲😵

In case you're not in awe enough of this feeding process, here's something else to dazzle you: the parents find their wayward fledglings by the chirps and squawks these youngsters make. Uniquely, per bird. I can't even tell one dull House Sparrow from the next based on their chirps alone. How do birds do this?!! Birds are truly remarkable!

Check out a good example of fledgling behavior in this video about House Sparrows:

Speaking of House Sparrows, though the first 2025 fledgling I saw at our front bird feeder was a House Sparrow, I was even more excited to see what may be our first nestbox fledgling on the ground today! It too is a House Sparrow, but I think it's from the nestbox right outside our sunroom, the one I featured in my May 6th post. This industrious couple has not only been working nonstop, first at nestbox early claiming and defending, then nest-building, then at copulating, then at roosting their eggs, and now at feeding their chicks, but they now also have had to frequently defend them against a blood-thirsty Blue Jay! For the first time I've ever witnessed, a nasty Blue Jay keeps coming to the nestbox to wrastle-up some baby chick meat! That's right! Little did I know, but Blue Jays are omnivores, and baby birds are on their menu!!

So now of course I'm even worried about these House Sparrow chicks and fledglings. I never thought I would say that, but it's true! As if I didn't have enough to worry about right now... 🙄😜