Remember last year’s incident? This year’s fledging process isn’t finished yet, but here’s what we’ve got so far:
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This is a perfectly good nest. I see no reason to leave. I’m not going to, and you can’t make me!
(Dear, this is getting ridiculous.)
(Here, let me try.)Â Lunch is served, kids, come and gettt itttt… Â Down here, Maya.
Kekoa hesitated till the pigeon was nearly gone, then made it safely down to the louver and joined in. Maya watched. Finally, it was just too much and she, as Channon put it, let freedom wing. (That link is a successful video capture of her first flight. It is very cool to watch, and you get to see the boingy-boing effect. She made it! Yay!)
She’s been there ever since, mostly huddled away from looking down. At one point both of them had their heads pushed up against the building: if we can’t see it, it can’t scare us.
Maybe tomorrow her mother will deliver food to the nest area to make her come back up. It would require going upwards, but it might still be the easiest thing to do next, at least in terms of confidence in this whole idea of being a flighty young thing.
Meantime, awhile after eating, Kekoa flew to the one place the camera absolutely could not reach him: he sat on top of it. Then he winged it to the far end of the building to the right, and the camera, angled up and across, showed the corner on the diagonal–and that little scamp played peek-a-boo! Leaning his face way out and eyeballing the camera, ducking back, leaning out again, from above the point of the triangle effect, below the point, turning away and out of sight, sometimes showing his backside, sometimes not at all. Hah! There you are! I see you! Can’t catch me!
And then he took off from there to the end of the ledge and down and bounced and flew over just a bit to the louver.
Hey. I can’t leave my sister all alone like that.
He has stayed with her ever since. He knows by now that he can make it back up to the ledge behind the nestbox, but she doesn’t know yet that she can. So he’s staying on that louver, and they are snuggled up for the night.
Dad, Piz’za Chicago…?
NO.