Flycatcher Rescue

For a month or so, Tom and I have been watching a couple of little gray flycatchers set up housekeeping in a tree right outside our house. They built this nest, made mostly of hair from the tails of the horses, on a dead branch about 20 feet up in the tree. We watched when they first started weaving the nest, and lately we’ve been watching the adult birds fly in and out of the nest.

Yesterday I went shopping, and Tom and I marched back and forth under the nest unloading the truck. Then we had a torrential downpour. About a half hour later we went out to make sure the truck was empty and were dismayed to see the branch with the nest on the ground.

Tom picked it up and we could hear a faint peeping from inside the nest, so we decided to tie the branch to the tree and see if the parents would come back. The nest isn’t as high in the tree as it was, but it’s in approximately the same position. To our surprise, we saw one of the parent birds fly into the next within an hour of the rescue. As we ate breakfast this morning, we watched them flying in and out, and when we walk under the nest we can hear peeping which seems to us to be stronger than it was last night. We’re now about 24 hours out from the rescue, and everything seems to be fine – although every time I hear a branch crack, I run to the window to make sure the dead twig holding the nest hasn’t broken, since that twig is much smaller than the branch that broke yesterday. We’re just hoping it holds until the babies can fly away.