2024, animals, Family, home, Kids, Nature, Uncategorized

Fledglings

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For the past several weeks Husband and I didn’t go out of our front door. Some enterprising robins built a nest atop the light that illuminated the stoep, hatched four eggs, and were busily feeding their chicks. We didn’t want to disturb them by going in and out the front door. You can see the nest in the header photo.

We could see the chicks getting bigger, and by Saturday, the last of the chicks was perched on the bench below the nest.

I like the baby tufts on his head. He sat there for a day, then flew off. I hope he has a nice adulthood.

I was always pretty independent and left the nest pretty easily, although with lots of anxiety. So did Husband and our children. I have known a few families in town where the children never manage to leave. In Winnipeg, it was typical for young people to buy their first home on the same block as their parents. That would have been pretty weird, I think, but typical for Canadian society.

What kind of a fledgling were you? Got any good bird stories?

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29 thoughts on “Fledglings”

  1. I intended to leave the nest just a week or two shy of my 18th birthday to head for the Army. then I overheard my father tell my mom sometime late in July that he was just waiting for me to be out of the house, so I went to the recruiter and bumped it forward to August 8th. I was out.

    The ripple effect of that choice left me without much, if any, fathering during those years before my adolescent brain caught up with my body. It also left me stunted in what to do with a son who left for college at age 18, and whom I pretty much neglected after that because I regarded him as independent, like I had been at his age.

    This is not a good scenario.

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  2. Rise and Shine, Baboons, from JacAnon,

    My fledgling years were herky-jerky and full of mistakes on the part of all involved. But despite all this I seemed to thrive when I caught on to the process of understanding that what I wanted for myself mattered in this process.

    After high school I went to the local college for my first two years after being heavily recruited by the staff and professors there, who were our friends and neighbors. The head of the music department, Dr. Frank Summerside,who lived three doors down the street, provided a substantial music scholarship. I did not want to attend this college and I didnot want to be a music teacher. That did not matter. Three days before my 18th birthday, he brought my schedule for the next four years to our house, sat me down at the kitchen table where he reviewed this.

    I was not ready for this. The next day I went to the dean’s office and changed my major to psychology, and my schedule shifted from a defined four years, to an exploration of what life had to offer. Dr. Summerside was absolutely stunned that I did this and did not understand that I could not yet make such a commitment to music. I left the college after two years and attended Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa where my father attended and graduated. My mother viewed this as an act of rebellion.

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      1. Yes, hubris! I am sure he felt he was granting me a favor, though. I loved being part of his music program for the two years I was there, but I did not want to teach 5th graders how to playthe clarinet as a career. That never occurred to him.

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    2. Our son also went to college with a scholarship in music. Double bass. But that first year away, from Rochester MN to Chicago no less, sure opened his eyes. He realized music wasn’t his passion. He started doing medical stuff and assisted in the cadaver lab. He started doing security, he looked at the Navy Seals. (Holy cow, did that surprise us! He’s barely fired a gun at home and now he wants to be a SEAL?? We just said he had to finish college first. This was his sophmore year. ‘How do you keep them down on the farm once they’ve seen Chicago??’ ) And here he is a police officer. And we can see now, that was always his personality – caring and protective, and watching out for his friends.

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  3. I was out of the house and independent by the time I was 19. Robin and I married when we were 21.

    Best bird experience was when two great horned owls fledged in the tree outside our living room window.

    owls

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    2. The owl in front, who was a little older and bigger, we named Brodie, after Steve Brody who was reputed to have been the first person to leap off the Brooklyn Bridge and survive. We chose that name because we imagined he had been the first to plummet from his treetop nest because of his boldness. We later learned that that’s just what owl chicks do when they reach a certain size. The smaller owl we named Horton because he heard a whooo.

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  4. The music’s not so great.

    It’s not my story per se but I go to this bird store once a week. Last Thursday, I got a special treat from Ursula, a bird not shown, who showed me each of her new toys. We talk “telephone” together. Rrrrrrrrring!

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  5. Left home for Carleton at 18 (just barely).  Spent a couple of breaks/summers back in St. Louis but when I took time off my junior year, I got an apartment in Northfield and found a job.  Never went back to Carleton and never moved back home. I could have lived with my mom but as much as I adored my dad (and vice versa), we were too much alike to keep living together amicably.

    So it sometimes surprises me that YA, at 29, is still living at home.  I’ve come to understand, from her example, that not every single person needs to fledge the same way.  She is paying off her school loans at a good clip, got her own car loan last summer, handles all her own bills, insurance, health care, pet responsibilities.  Is paying half of the kitchen and bathroom projects.  Has three degrees and a good job.  Somehow that seems pretty fledged to me, even if she’s still living in her mom’s house.

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  6. I stayed at home at 18 since I was working at home. I felt and acted independent, and mom and dad encouraged that. They started splitting the milk check with me and I shared in the bills. Mom was really good at figuring out stuff like getting my name on the electric bill, so 10 years later when I got married, it was simply a matter of taking their name off, not me trying to start a new account.

    Mom always said I was better with money than my brother. I don’t know about that (because I don’t know what he did with his money) but it make a big influence on me.

    I did feel bad I never got to go off and be a ‘college student’ or anything like that. And at the same time, I felt much more mature than my college student friends.

    Also, at the same time, Dad had his ways of doing things, and I have VIVID memories of him taking over some project I was working on and chewing me out for the way i was doing it. It’s too bad how those memories stick harder than the loving, good memories. That still makes me sad.

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  7. Left home at age 18 for Iowa State, but parents paid all my tuition except for one quarter of summer school. (My dad was able to add on teaching Drivers Ed at the high school, which covered it.) Then I took off for San Francisco upon graduating in ’70.

    I lived with them again for a few months after breaking up with Wasband, before I moved to Minneapolis – did some substitute teaching in Marshalltown, but it wasn’t more than a couple of days a week, and I wasn’t able to save much.

    So for a second time, in January 1977, I moved to an entirely new city with just a couple of hundred dollars to my name, and started out with temp. secretarial agencies. OMG, how gutsy we were back then!

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      1. Sorta confessional of marital strife in which I played my part. I am so glad my daughter left a conflicted home. She landed an awesome man!

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    2. I can imagine that my parents felt a bit like the parents in this song. The difference was that I didn’t leave a note, and I had left several times prior to leaving for good. First to Switzerland, then to the USSR, then to Greenland. I don’t think it ever occurred to any of us, me included, that when I left for the USA I wouldn’t be returning anytime soon, or perhaps never.

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  10. I left for college at 17 – 3 months before my 18th birthday. I did go home for a summer job for 3 years. Then I got a summer job at the University Hospital and have stayed in the Cities ever since. My junior and senior high school years were not easy. Dad and I had similar temperaments which led to quite a bit of tension. Things got better once I was out of the house. Mom and I got along OK but we never had a close relationship. Moving back home for any reason was never an option.

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  11. I left home at 18. I came home on spring break from St. Olaf, and was working on a paper in my bedroom. Mom came in and declared that if I wasn’t going to help her clean the house while I was there, I could just go find my own place to live. So I did. I think it really surprised her and that she was sorry. She was an unhappy person sometimes, and I think that was one of those moments. I couldn’t see it then, but I did see her clearly later.

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  12. My father died when I was seventeen, and my mother was unemployed shortly afterward. I got a job and by the time I was eighteen I got an apartment with a friend. When I was in vocational school I stayed with my mother, who had sold the house and rented an apartment, for about ten months. On my own after that. There wasn’t much of a safety net, so figuring out how to support myself was a priority. It’s worked out.

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    1. I never had much of a safety net, either. Looking back on it now, I have no idea how I functioned. You just do what you have to do to survive, I guess.

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