Of Happy Endings...

 

This post is surely about happy endings. And perhaps, new beginnings... After all, endings and beginnings do go hand in hand.

But let me start at the very beginning. In mid-February, a pair of purple sunbirds built their nest on a hanging hen chime in our patio. While we watched in anticipation, the obvious never happened. For sometime in March, amidst a spate of untimely thunderstorms, the sunbirds disappeared and wouldn't return to the nest. I'm assuming (from whatever little footage we could see via our CCTV) that a bigger nocturnal bird attacked their nest.

Then again in May the purple sunbirds came back. After diligently repairing the nest, the pair started raising a brood. And this time three little chicks magically appeared one day in June.

Within a couple of weeks, with the parent birds' due care and nurturing, the triplets grew quickly. From pink blobs of flesh with eyes closed, they turned into beautiful little chicks with soft yet strong wings, yellow beaks, and the most shiny black eyes.

The nest suddenly became full of activities - the parent birds' coming and going multiple times as they brought food and groomed their babies, the chicks scrambling over each other in their eagerness to get ahead, and plenty of cheeps as the siblings moved around, perhaps flapping their new-found wings.

And before we realised, on the last morning of June, all three of them flew out, one after another. We could catch only one of them in flight, on camera.

It was the happiest and most heartwarming sight to watch the sunbird chicks take wing. With their pretty plumage all bright, the chicks flew away to new beginnings.

We marvelled at the intricacies of nature, and at how clean these tiny birds had left the nest. As we became empty nesters, albeit with our hearts full! ❤️❤️❤️