Bye, Bye, Birdie

For the past 2 months, we have been the home of a hummingbird family.  We first discovered the bird when I looked on my patio lights and I saw a bird nest with a hummingbird sitting so still, I thought it was fake.  Also, I thought it was completely astonishing that the bird (Tweeker, Emerson named her), built a nest on the strand of a Christmas light.  If you look closely at the nest, you can see that she made it out of some of my shredded bills that was sitting in my compost.

After a month, there were two baby humming birds.  Emerson named them Linker and Dexter.  After a couple of weeks the nest was too small and unstable for both birds.  Linker kept falling out of the nest so we put her in a small bowl and placed her on top of a ladder right next to her brother's nest.  After a week, we weren't sure if either one of the babies would survive.  We saw that Dexter was not thriving and after a couple more days, he died.  We held our breaths for Linker and it seemed that she was getting bigger and stronger and her wings would flap like she was trying to fly.

After Dexter died, we didn't know if Tweeker was coming to feed Linker anymore so we did some research on the internet and started to feed Linker some sugar water mixed with some dead bugs we crushed up and fed her through a medicine dropper.

She seemed to really like the food we were feeding her.  It turns out that Tweeker didn't abandon linker and she was coming around a couple of times throughout the day to feed her baby.

Alas, we come to this fateful night.  We went to the Padres game tonight and when we got home we went to the backyard to check on Linker.  We saw Putty licking something.  "Graham" I said.  "Will you see what Putty is chewing on."  Well, you probably know what came next.  That damn, Dog!!!!  Linker was probably getting strong enough to attempt to try to fly and fell out of her bowl, off the ladder and landed on the ground.  While we searched on the internet on how to take care of a humming bird, I specifically read, "If you have a dog, don't let him near the nest."  Why didn't I listen!!!  Now, all I can think about is poor Tweeker.  She won't know what happened to her baby when she comes to feed Linker in the morning.  And I have to tell Emerson what happened to her beloved Linker.  Damn, dog!!