Five

Today, from the mid-afternoon on, was clear, pleasantly warm, and sunny and, we thought, a perfect setting for visiting "the birds" once again. We watch the fledglings and mom and dad from the west side of the nest tree so this evening's sun gave everything a beautiful golden glow. By the time we arrived onsite, there were already two birders with two scopes trained at the top of the fir and shortly after we set up, several others came by, scopes, cameras and binocs at the ready. It's a congenial group of people here in the neighborhood who like to walk of an evening and watch birds. We don't become particularly loud. We're not messy at all. Being considered geeks, we take all comers. In fact there are no rules to the congregation, only a place and a reason. We love birds and especially these rather rare ones, the merlin falcons.
Once again, they didn't disappoint. The big discovery tonight was that there were 5 fledglings. This didn't come as much of a surprise as that has been the number for the past two years. We rather expected it. What was so hard about that expectation this year was proof because the nest is so obscure. Anyway, the branching going on the past few days has literally flushed the birds from the nest and allowed us to count heads, all five of them!
Tonight, Spike (the mother of the 15) positioned herself after one good feeding atop a nearby cedar tree and seemed to be stretching herself by spreading her wings and tail feathers. She, golden she, put on quite a show for all of the scopes and lenses below and spent enough time in the falling sunshine for many photos to be taken in the midst of a lot of "ooohs and aahhs". She is a wildly successful mother and mate, an absolutely ferocious protector and fighter, and an utter inspiration and delight for geeks like me. She thrills me as do her offspring.
Her little ones should be flying very soon. One or a couple were flying, whether they knew it or not, from branches and back to the nest this evening. It is not a far cry for one of them to travel to a neighboring tree in the next couple of days and we geeks with many lenses will be there to thrill once again to something we can't see too many times!