Incubation, Hatching, Nestling ... Empty Nest: Epilogue - Ornithology

Ornithology - a branch of zoology which concerns the study of birds.

As far as origin is concerned, birds are dinosaurs, avian dinosaurs to be exact, their lineage goes back to over 160 million years ago. Scientifically, birds are a group of feathered theropod dinosaurs, and constitute the only living dinosaurs. Likewise, birds are considered reptiles in the modern cladistic sense of the term, and their closest living relatives are the crocodilians.(Wikipedia).

The close observation of house finches' life on my front door made me want to know more about them - the primary source of information for me is the ornithology site "All about birds". House finch belongs to Passeriformes order, Fringillidae family, haemorhous genus, and has a scientific name of haemorhous mexicanus. They live in north America. 

House finches' range

Male house finch has red head and breast, female house finch has brownish color. They sing long, twittering, pleasant songs.  The red of a male house finch comes from pigments contained in its food during molt (birds can’t make bright red or yellow colors directly). So the more pigment in the food, the redder the male. This is why people sometimes see orange or yellowish male House Finches. Females prefer to mate with the reddest male they can find, perhaps raising the chances they get a capable mate who can do his part in feeding the nestlings.

Where do they live? How do they mate? How long do they live? ....

Surprisingly house finches, and birds in general, they don't live in their nests! The nests are for incubation and nestling. Once they grow up, they leave the nests and not return, as I observed of the finches on my front door.  So where do they sleep at nights? They just perch on a tree branch or even a windowsill for the night. 

A curiosity is how they mate. It turns out, the mating process is somewhat like many animals, male mount on female and intercourse. But for finches, this process is very quick, a couple seconds:  the hen squats in the ‘mating position’, lifting and vibrating her tail. The male then mounts her, and impregnates her with a perfunctory ‘cloacal kiss’, in which the all-purpose vents of the two birds make brief contact. His wings will flap as he pushes against her, the procedure is over in a couple of seconds, as captured in this video from YouTube. 

It is noted that house finches are monogamous in breeding, typical of song birds.

After mating, the female will lay ~ 4 eggs in the nest. The nest is of cup shape, Overall width of the nest is 3-7 inches, with the inside cup 1-3 inches across and up to 2 inches deep, so the nest on my front door was typical.

The finches' incubation time  is 13-14 days, nestling time  12-19 days. During the nestling period, the finch parents will feed the babes, and carry out feces initially and when young defecate too much, the droppings will be moved to the edge of the nest. The young finches fly out of the nest at the end of nestling period, and not to return, though they may live just in the surrounding area.

In contrast human's life  from inception of pregnancy to the baby walking steadily, which lasts about 3 years (156 weeks), on the other hand, house finches' growing up time from an egg to flying out of the nest, lasts only five weeks or so. House finches can live up to at least 11 years and 7 months in the wild. 

The circle of bird life continues, after 160 million years!

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Note

We rarely see dead birds despite the abundance of them around the communities. Birds, like many other creatures, will seek secluded places when they're feeling sick. Sick birds will go to ground and hide away. Sometimes, rest and seclusion help them to recover, but if they die there, they sometimes won't be found in their hideouts. In nature, things work in tandem. Scavengers and predators, such as rats, cats or foxes, can usually seek out these hideouts for prey. Often, these predators will eat the prey themselves or take them back to feed their young, which is why it's rare to find the remains of dead birds. Due to a bird's light body mass, those that aren't found by predators or scavengers will decompose rapidly. Insects will cover any dead body quickly and the bird would soon decay before it is found. (source of information). When dead birds are frequently observed in some area, that means there is a bird pandemic there.