Nature Study: Sunbird Nest!

During the rainy weeks around January and February, we didn’t do much laundry at home. Imagine our surprise when we went back to our laundry area and found this:

At first I thought it was just some random trash that got stuck at the end of our clothesline. But then my boys and I remembered that we’d been seeing an olive-backed sunbird or two flying around with some bits and pieces in its beak.

(For newbies, don’t worry, we used to think all birds were maya birds too! But we’ve been studying birds for a while now as part of our nature study—for us, birds were what made nature study come alive for us! Active as my boys are, they didn’t really take to flowers and plants as much as the challenge of watching for the flitting figure of a bird, and needing to note the shape and color of the head, beak, wings, tail, and feet! Wait, do we call them feet? Claws?)

And sure enough, upon closer inspection, we found that it was indeed a sunbird nest! I’ve spent several mornings with my 2yo and 8yo watching through the window—-and teaching the 2yo to whisper, instead of his yelling, “Bird! Bird!” every time he saw the sunbird or its mate flying to its nest!

And then a few days later, my hubby checked and saw that it has two eggs inside!

My older son raises lovebirds, and today he told me that he hasn’t seen the mommy sunbird incubating the eggs. He’s wondering if he should take the eggs and incubate them himself, or else they might die. He’s been wanting to raise hand-fed lovebirds, and I joked, what if he ended up raising hand-fed sunbirds instead? (Note: it was a joke. Keeping a wild bird as a pet still goes against my environmental/ecological conscience!)

So we checked Google, and it says the mommy does leave the eggs for short times during the day.

So it’ll be more observing for now, but we hope the eggs hatch!