Won't You Be My Nieghbor?

The most surprising addition to our neighborhood was not a young couple moving in near the house, it was a young couple moving in on the house. Specifically, a pair of Eastern Phoebes built a nest on top of a remnant piece of a mud dauber nest, high up on the outside garage wall, but within a few feet of our kitchen window.

The nest is within a few inches of the ceiling making it impossible
to check the eggs. She's incubating, so we know they're in there!

Too keep disturbance to a minimum we use the garage door as little as possible, but we do stare out the kitchen window periodically to watch the female incubate. In fact, if you look carefully in the above image you'll see one of our household is watching. Here's an inside shot of the voyeur.

Tazzie, short for "Tasmanian Devil," which barely begins to
describe him, spends the bulk of his time monitoring the nest. As an
indoor cat, this is the closest he'll get to actually earning his dinner.

The phoebe parents let us know how they feel if we do use the garage door. They let us know how they feel a lot. The only time I brought a ladder over to photograph the nestlings one of the parents nicked the back of my head with a wing. I took a couple quick shots and I haven't been back, why stress them more than necessary? OK, to be honest, I thought it would be a bit embarrassing to explain to the doctor a bird weighing less than 20 grams knocked me off a ladder.

"I swear, doc, first I kept hearing their incessant chipping . . .


. . . then it got quiet, too quiet. When I looked over my shoulder I saw I was getting the avian version of the stink eye . . .


. . . and that's when they attacked! Just like the Hitchcock film, for sure!"

I didn't get footage of them attacking me, but here's a typical scene when opening the garage door. We've yielded use of our outdoor furniture to them for now, but we're hoping we can resume eating outside soon.



And here's what it's all about: the young-un's. This was taken a couple of days before they fledged, they're probably about 14 days old here. I couldn't tell you how many were in there, but my best estimate is four. They fledged last week, either the 10th or 11th, and haven't seen them since. We've seen the parents a couple of times in the yard, but no sign of the fledgies.

Interestingly, one of the parents has been returning to the nest this week, as though it left something behind. The nest is empty, I checked shortly after they fledged and there's not even an unhatched egg in there.

Phoebes are typically double-brooded, and maybe it's not too early to be thinking about a second nest already. It turns out they will reuse an existing nest; one study showed more than half of old phoebe nests (those present before the nesting season started) were used. The jury is still out on why, perhaps the energy savings in building a new one transfers into larger clutches (as postulated by some researchers), though another study challenged this idea as "reworked" nests did not yield more offspring.

Regardless of why, they seem to be gearing up for round two. I guess we won't be getting our patio back for another month or more, though it's worth the sacrifice!

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