Cutie Update, plus a Cheepy past adventure in shama politics

DJ here.

We've gotten a couple of nice comments from NextDoor members who have checked out the blog, so thanks for that. And feel free to comment at the bottom of the blog page if you have questions or comments, might encourage us to post more.

here's one of the chicklets from last July, the Cuties look like this now

The progress with the two "cutie" chicks who have recently left the nest is going apace; they are both healthy. One of them is hanging around in the upper yard near the house much of the time, with the other one down in the yard.  The one frequenting the upper yard is pretty used to me, since it has seen its parents landing on me repeatedly, and I can whistle it pretty close, sometimes to the railing next to me. However, this batch isn't yet old enough to know to pick up things, so they aren't directly asking me for snacks yet. Rather, I can be right there with their dad grabbing food from me, doing a half-turn, and shoving it in their faces, but they don't see me as a favorite uncle yet. Next week.

I have some pix of them but I'm too lazy, now at the end of the day, to pull the card from the DSLR and upload and crop and set levels and pixel size and all that. I'll get to it someday.

But for now I'll do a link to a past item of interest... this was Cheepy, originally Cheepy1, from the 3rd fledging of 2019; Cheepy is the chick who hung around longest and made it to full maturity while still spending a fair bit of time in our house hanging out.

This video snippet is shot on my cel phone camera, and picks up the last part of a standoff between Cheepy and his Dad, who normally terrorizes chicks until they leave. Cheepy had taken my advice and decided to claim the front yard as part of his new territory, which is a fairly terrible territory except for the fact that it comes with me; but I think what i was seeing was boundaries being set, in this case in the middle of the driveway.  Instead of fighting, Bird did a long recitation of the history of his people, or whatever he says when he gets long-winded, and then with a final "SO THERE!" lunge he leaves Cheepy without being further attacked, and after that day stopped trying to kill him, though he would still chase him beyond the territory boundary, which Cheepy frequently transgressed since the door to our upstairs house was in Bird's territory.

Anyhow, here's the brief encounter... Bird on the left speaking at length, Cheepy on the right, both in formal postures... I missed the first two minutes or so of Bird's epic song, though the birds were in that position for that whole time.

This took place before Cheepy was in adult plumage, probably around late summer 2019. And yes, Cheepy would respond to his given name; or rather, he knew when I yelled "cheepy!" it meant "come on over".