A Helping Hand for House Finches

It started on the fifth of April,  with a typical rainy morning, when I looked out my bedroom window and saw this little fella with a big Fu Manchu of nesting material. I skibbled down the hall in my jams, did a two-wheel corner into the studio, grabbed the big camera, and thank God he was still a settin' there when I got back. 

First, you gotta love a guy who helps around the house. Second, my affection for house finches has grown over the years, as I've watched them decline pretty drastically from their mid 1980's explosion in New England, then all up and down the Eastern Seaboard.  They were frankly a huge pain, mobbing feeders by the score and tweeting incessantly. Loudly and incessantly.

Nature finds its balance, though. I've watched as they have been taken out by inbreeding depression, which means they have little resistance to disease. All eastern house finches descend from a release event at a NYC pet shop in 1939.
They were imported from California and sold as "Hollywood Linnets." Imagine. This is what the Migratory Bird Treaty Act disallowed! Let's hear it for that!  Being inbred and with little genetic diversity,  they've succumbed to Mycoplasma gallinae, a disease of domestic chickens that also strikes at least 30 other native songbirds to date. I'm so happy now when I see healthy house finches and I really do wish them the best. After all, they are native to North America--just not east of the Mississippi. Their song is among my favorites--so clear and vibrant, a tumbling cascade of beautiful notes.

I figured they were building, and it wasn't hard to figure out where. House finches like dense conifers close to houses. Duh?

And speaking of duh...Do you see their neatly woven nest?

With its precious cargo of four eggs of palest blue, ink-dotted with black?

Daddy's whiskers for a lining and a mourning dove tail feather for good measure. Ah, it's all too sweet--and too damned visible. Any blue jay worth its salt--and there are at least six around the yard this year hooray!!--is going to key in on that nest immediately, if not sooner. If I can find it so easily, what about a sharp-eyed jay or crow?

So I cut a thick branch off the bottom of the same spruce and stuffed it into the boughs over the nest, making a little awning to hide it from predatory eyes. 

Better. (Compare to first photo). 

You have to approach it from the side to see it. Jays flying over won't see it nearly so easily. At least that's the hope. 

And speaking of hope...they hatched April 21.

And here they are on Day 2, April 22. The weird yellow thing is the transparent crop of a baby which has its head down in the nest lining to the right. That's actually regurgitated seed fed to it by its parents, and it's completely normal for an infant house finch to look like that. I know it's hard to tell what you're looking at, but the lower chick has a downy head to the right and two sweet little arcs of downy wings on either side.

House finches were the most challenging of baby birds to paint for my book, Baby Birds: An Artist Looks Into the Nest because they have so darn much long grayish white down that their anatomy was totally obscured! But oh are they dear. Crossing my fingers for this nest, hoping the cold spring keeps the ratsnakes in their burrows, hoping the chipmunks won't brave the prickly spruce--just hoping for everything. Know the feeling?