What will the empty nesters do now?

In addition to the Chickadees who are now raising babies a foot away from my back door, a very busy pair of House Wrens has been — for the second year in a row — occupying the birdhouse I attached to the backyard garage. Last year a commenter had the nerve to snark that A-frame houses went out of style in the 70s, but the wrens either don’t care or are into 70s revivalism or something, because they keep coming back. Papa Wren has serious temper problems and is in need of anger management over the way he kept squawking at me and Coco in the past couple of weeks, even lunging at times despite his teensy size. There were also many pitched battles with other birds, including serious aerial combat. I’ll spare the gory details, but trust me, wrens are incredibly feisty.

What I didn’t realize was how quickly the young grow into fledglings. It seems that the fussing and commotion had barely started and then suddenly — just a few days ago (Friday June 16, to be exact) I was out in the yard and suddenly saw three wrens in succession exit the house and fly awkwardly to nearby bushes! As they fluttered, the parents were calling to them and encouraging them. I ran inside and grabbed my camera, and while I couldn’t catch them in flight, I saw two more babies getting ready to fly the coop, and I caught this picture of them looking out from the safety of their next for one last time, at the new world they were going to bravely enter:

(As you can see, other birds have tried to break into the wren home, and have damaged the opening slightly. It’s a brutal world.)

The mama and the papa were calling their babies urgently — the goal was obviously to get them into the next yard and into a big tree, but to do that they had to make it to the garage behind mine. (A big deal for tiny birds that have never gone anywhere and can barely fly.)

I caught this one clambering awkwardly up along the boards towards the roof:

On the garage roof he met up with his parents, who then kept moving him and the others one by one into the cover and safety of the big tree whereupon they became invisible but not inaudible.

While this happened very quickly, there was one slight glitch. For some time, a straggler refused to leave the house. He kept peeping for his mama, but she held firm, screaming for him to come — as if she was saying “I’ll only take care of you if you come to me!” Here he is — the lone holdout, and he stayed in there for several hours while being yelled at:

Amazing. You’d almost think they had some brains.

I might add that not wanting to leave the nest is “natural,” but you know how I hate the misuse of that word, so I won’t.