Chaos In The Bird Room! :-/

What a "fun" morning. NOT! :-/ Today is cleaning day in the bird room, and I saw that Frostie's nest box with the three youngsters needed to be cleaned badly. Icky!!! So I carefully removed the nest box from the cage, with the not-yet-fledged babies inside, thinking I'd move them out of the box just long enough to wash it, then put them back in with new, clean nesting materials.

They had other plans.

No sooner did I get the babies moved out of the box, they all decided THAT would be a good time to try out their wings. Away they all flew! :-O My bird room is small, only 9'x9', so we managed to find two of the three babies fairly quickly. We put them right back in the cage with their mom. The last baby DISAPPEARED. We tore the room apart trying to find it, but it was just GONE. An hour and many gray hairs later, I finally spied it hiding behind a seed tray in the cage on the shelf below its mom's cage. It's gray, so it blended right in with the black cage and tray. Robert managed to catch it, and took it back home to its mom. Whew.

Here are some new pics, taken this morning. ;-)



Above: Frostie's two biological babies, Peanut and Jelly Bean, and foster baby Muffin (Whisper and Ghost's "runt"). This was before I cleaned their nest box. Eeeew. As I mentioned previously, I don't generally clean nest boxes until after the babies have fledged except in extreme cases, and this one definitely qualified as "extreme". LOL!



Above: Frostie afterwards, looking not-too-thrilled at me! :-(



Above: The three "surprise!!!" fledglings.



Above: Whisper and two of her three babies, Bagel and Biscuit. They're learning how to eat on their own now. :-) Muffin is Whisper's other baby (the one that Frostie is fostering).



Above: Tangerine and Echo's baby. They had two originally, but she tossed one of them. :-(