There are baby canaries in my house! :)
I had two hens on nests.... and they each hatched two chicks!This is the yellow hen's nest, with her two chicks...
Warning: view at your own risk! They 'ain't pretty'!
But they are about one week old, and it won't be long and they will look 'a little' better with feathers.
In a month, they will be out of the nest and look just like regular canaries.
When they hatched, they were just a bit larger than the egg that is still in the nest!
Laurie, you asked for the 'cute' pictures of the baby canaries...
Well, here are the two 'babies' shown in the earlier photo, with the two babies from the red factor hen:
The variegated and yellow birds are from the yellow hen, and both birds on the right (both top perch and the branch) are from the red factor hen.
Okay, they grew up before I got a photo! They are still smaller than adult size, and soon they will molt their juvenile feathers.
So.... the two hens went to work again! :)
Here are their second nestlings:
First the yellow hen had four babies:
Here are the red hen's babies:
I must admit that I am not particularily attracted to the variegated ones... I love the solid colored canaries best. But I think the soft peachy color of the red factor babies made them look 'sweeter'! :)
I wish I had thought to take a video clip.... as these babies got older, they began to look around and watch mama eating on the floor. Sometimes they hopped to the edge of the nest. I would peek through the doorway from the other room and see they were just overflowing the nest. The nests looked like they had a frothy, feathery topknot. I never could sneak close enough to get a good photo.... as soon as they caught a glance of me, they would duck and the nest would SINK! The whole top just disappeared! It was so funny! It was hard to believe all those big babies could flatten out so much!
The day after I took these photos, all eight babies LEFT THE NESTS! Wow, did they have problems getting their 'sea legs' ! Or 'flying wings'! They usually fell to the bottom of the cage, but could fly from perch to perch up to the top again. It is amazing how well they could fly when you think they spent a month just sitting in the nest. BUT, they flutter their wings very fast all the while the parents are feeding them, so I suppose that is Nature's way to build up their wing strength.
