By and by the children noticed a movement under the mother bird’s wing. Then a tiny yellow head came poking out through her feathers. When she got off the next day to eat, they noticed a hole no bigger than a pin head in the shell of one of the remaining eggs, then a yellow bill was thrust through, and withdrawn again. After that there was a pecking and a struggling inside the shell, and the next thing they knew, out came the funniest baby they had ever seen, with pieces of the shell still sticking to him.
Naked he was, with eyes not yet open, and a head so large for his slender neck that he could hardly hold it up. His legs sprawled weakly from beneath him, and his toes were so fragile that it seemed as if they must break if he tried to stand on them.
The bird hatched the day before was the same. The next day came another, and the day after that, another. The fifth egg did not hatch, and the mother bird shoved it out of the nest with her foot.
My, how busy those four fledglings did keep their parents for the next two weeks! Opening their wide mouths till one could see right down their throats, they would just sit there in the nest all day long eating what their parents brought them,—chopped egg and cracker, and baby bird seed, which the big birds first cracked for them in their own bills. It seemed as if there was no getting those young canaries filled. Every time one got a mouthful, he would flap his pin-feathery wings and cry “tweet-tweet-tweet-tweet,” till one wondered how so much voice could issue from such a tiny bird.
By the time the little ones were able to stand on the roost in a row, there were only three, for one had lost his balance as he stood on the edge of the nest, and all the flapping of his nearly naked wings had not served to break his fall.
Chirping their high-pitched food call, the remaining birdlings would flap wings that just began to show a row of teeny, pale yellow feathers along the edges.
Then a dreadful thing happened. A great brown butcher bird lived in a thorn bush not far away. This horrid creature lived on mice and little birds, and like the witch of the fairy tale, hung his victims on the thorns till he was ready to eat them.
One day the children thought the canaries would like to be out of doors, and hung the cage in a pine tree. An hour later that butcher bird had reached in through the bars of the cage and bitten the heads off the whole canary family save one little one. He had been in the nest out of reach.
The little girl cried her heart out. But they decided they would do their best to bring that fledgling up by hand. By this time he was just about big enough to have gone to bed in a teaspoon. His wings were fringed with pale yellow, and he would perch on a fore finger and open his mouth for them to feed him, chirping shrilly and flapping his wings with all his might to keep from falling off.
The boy gave him just the tiniest bits at a time on the end of a flattened twig. Soon he was able to eat for himself. At night he had to be snuggled into a warm nest made of an old piece of flannel, and every day his cage was set in the sunshine and he was given a saucer of clean, warm water to bathe in. My, how he did love to splash.