Darwin called it

Okay- so this darling, noisy Blue Jay from my previous post, apparently has/had a family near by. Our cat Salem brought us one of their babies last night. Fortunately it was still alive and we rescued it from his claws. We put the bird in a towel and set it out to hopefully fly away. So... after noticing the bird was gone, we let the cat out again. Stupid mistake. Minutes later the cat was back with the bird AGAIN. We rescued it again and this time - we were much smarter- we put it in a laundry basket covered with a towel so it could recover safely overnight. (Salem was now banished to the garage.) At 6am I was wakened by the noisy parents trying to get to their baby. I took the towel off and hoped he would soon get the idea to fly away. I put bread crumbs and water out for them. The baby finally hopped out of the basket and on to the grass. I watched him closely and all of us kept checking on the family all day. The parents were feeding him, he was hopping all over the place just happy as can be. Success! We had saved the bird. :-) So we thought. Dallin went out a little later to see how things were going and found total sadness..... this darling baby bird had hopped his little self right into our pool and drowned. After all that! Drowning in our pool. Good grief. To quote Alan (who was, of course, out of town when all this trauma was going on), "Darwin called it".

The boys buried the bird in the yard. Here is a picture of them with the grave they so lovingly made. Please pay no attention to the Grim Reaper costume Brayden is wearing. I'm sure the fact that he and Dallin had it on all day had nothing to do the untimely death.....Just don't look to closely at Brayden's face. He really was sad for the bird, he just likes to be in "character" for pictures.