Finch Babies

I have tried to take photos of the baby Zebra finches but it's a little tricky. There are lighting issues, disturbing the parent's issues and the fact that they look so strange you really have a hard time deciding if you got a good photo or not when you are trying to distinguishing what it is you are looking at.

Here are the little flufflings soon after hatching. At this stage, they are actually called "nestlings", but I like thinking of them as flufflings because they are all fluffy. 

They are really kind of weird things at first, but it is amazing how fast they grow. Before long they actually begin to look like birds... and just a note: I think that they look and sound like tiny Emperor penguins, the ones you might see in Antarctica.

Finch eggs are usually laid one per day for several days,  and then, when the last egg is laid, they begin incubating them by sitting on them.  Interesting that until the parents start sitting on the eggs and keeping them warm the fertile eggs do nothing in particular.. or so "they say."  The eggs then start hatching about two weeks days later.


It was hard to tell how many eggs were in the nest.  I kknew we had lost one, and sometimes they cover up eggs with nesting material, so those never hatch, but it was discovered that there were three.

Two of them are gray and one is lighter gray, almost white.

 In this photo the white one is on the right.  you can barely see the eye peeking out.

Mom in the nest with the babies.

Then they become fledglings and hop out of the nest.  Here is one now....

They are cute!


Noisy... and demanding of their parents, which depend  a lot on me to keep up the food supply for these hungry babies.  I give them bird seed, millet, apple, lettuce, clover and alafa sprouts and sometimes I hard boil an eggs and give them some of that.