It was late Friday afternoon. The boys had finished their online classes for the day, and I had just finished a call for work. Our 10-year-old stopped to look at our pet finches, and he turned to me—his eyes bigger than I’ve ever seen them.
“Baby bird!” he said in an excited whisper. “Baby bird in the nest!”
“Wait, what?” I said. “Are you serious?”
He was. In our finches’ nest was a tiny, scraggly baby bird pulling itself out of an egg. The next day, a second egg hatched. We now have a finch family of four.
The boys are over the moon. John and I are half-excited, half-nervous about how many finches our future holds—and wondering whether we are capable of caring for the four we now have.
It’s all very special and amazing and miraculous and extraordinary and a little unbelievable.
How did this happen?
Well, we knew we could end up with baby finches. Rearing zebra finch chicks certainly wasn’t our goal when we added two pandemic pet birds to the family in June. At that time, I thought—in fact, hoped—that they were the same gender.
Early on, though, I realized our new finches were male and female. There seemed to be no turning back. You don’t return pets to the store because you want a different gender.
At that point, we realized eggs—and baby finches—could be part of our future.
Hermione (the lovely white bird in the photos) laid her first egg about five weeks ago, and it fell out of the nest and broke. She laid another and another and another, and those fell and broke, too.
One day, though, two of the eggs fell and got caught in the side of the cage. Looking at how they had fallen, we could see the structural issues with the nest. I gave Ron (the handsome darker bird) and Hermione extra building materials and pushed some pieces into the side of the nest. No eggs have fallen since then.
Days sort of run together, and last week it occurred to me that the two eggs that were in the nest had been in there for some time. I found myself googling, “How long do zebra finch eggs take to hatch?”
Fifteen to 18 days. Hmm.
Could those eggs have chicks inside?
I started counting back to when the eggs had been laid. I thought they might hatch next week, but I am not much of a mathematician—or the Internet is not as reliable as I had thought. Because here we have two precious little baby finches.
They are tiny and fragile and gangly and scrawny and sweet.
The mother and father finches take turns sitting on them to keep them warm. They feed them and care for them with an instinctive capability that is truly God-given. I marvel at this miraculous story of life that is unfolding in a corner of our living room.
And I have the added pleasure of watching our sons check in on their finches with pride and fascination and joy.
I remind our boys that the babies are fragile, and we don’t know whether they will grow into adult birds.
But even before their eyes have opened and their feathers have grown in, these little ones have already captured our hearts.
I don’t know what the future holds, but we will figure it out as it happens. For now, we will be enjoying our newly hatched chicks.
What a gift these tiny creatures are to our family.
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