housemates

In honor of Earth Day (yesterday), I'm going to indulge in an animal story, though it's not exactly conservation oriented. For the past few weeks, I've had some new housemates- a family of house finches. I discovered this one morning when I was awakened at 7 am by the sound of a bird in my room. I frantically, sleepily scanned the bedroom and realized it was actually in the windowsill outside my window air conditioner. Because there are decent sized cracks around the air conditioner, which I never got around to sealing, it was like having a singing bird about 2 m from my head. Anyway, i debated whether to move the nest materials as they accumulated for a few days, until the nest was complete and it seemed unfair. In a few more days, 4 speckled eggs appeared, and mother finch and I grew accustomed to scaring the wits out of each other every time I walked to my car and she flew off the nest. She's lucky I'm not a predator! Today I heard unusually loud chirping in the morning, and in my dreams there were 4 hungry beaks poking out of the nest. Later, when I peeked down through the window, there was only one very small, slimy pink blob with a few tufts of fuzz sitting there with 3 eggs. Unbelievable that something so small can make so much noise. This thing was not cute, by any stretch of the imagination, but I started to feel attached. So now I'm trying to think of 4 good unisex names for my new housemates. House finches are not as high on my list as something like bluebirds, since they're introduced from the western US, and growing more common. They should fledge in a couple weeks, so they'll be around just long enough to get me out of bed during final project and exam time.