Birds of a feather?

I just realised this morning that we have a neat little story unfolding in our backyard, starring two very unlikely partners and all of us in this household are very hopeful of a happy ending.

I’d noticed the constant squeaky squawk of a (rather loud) baby bird over the last few days (it’s been a little annoying to be honest first thing in the morning), but because I’ve been off to work the last couple of days I hadn’t thought too much about it. But today is my day off and as we enjoyed a bit of a lay in this morning my husband commented on the annoying sound coming from outside out bedroom window.

He told me it was a baby Blue Faced Honeyeater making the noise. He’s seen it over the last 3 or 4 days both here in our yard and over at the park just a few hundred metres from our house. He told me that a Peewee seemed to have adopted it. He thought the Peewee was feeding it but wasn’t sure.

“Really?” This seemed like an unlikely story. These are two very different birds with different habits and the baby Honeyeater is much bigger than the adult Peewee. Hmmmmm……

When I got out of bed, the young Honeyeater was kind of lying on the top of the wooden fence that separates us from the neighbours behind us, making the constant racket it had been making since we woke up. I went to the toilet and brushed my teeth then looked out of the bedroom window again but couldn’t see it on the fence anymore. I could however still hear it. My eyes scanned around the back yard and there it was, on the grass, eating the native Portulaca (pigweed) that grows in our lawn. It was pulling at the weed and eating bits and squawking in between each beak full.

The next thing I heard the shrill ‘Peep, peep’ of the Peewee and down it flew, to the young honeyeater and gave it a whatever was in it’s own beak. It is feeding the honeyeater! How bizarre is that? We’re wondering if the the Honeyeater is getting enough to eat from the much smaller Peewee that would be used to feeding much smaller baby Peewee’s, but the Honeyeater is able to fly and still seems to have plenty of energy to make the never ending racket that it makes all day and to get around and to eat the wild portulaca from the lawn.

So we’re hopeful that this unlikely pair will work and that the Blue Faced Honeyeater will survive to be an adult and go on to have it’s own babies. You never know, it might just adopt some other birds offspring if the need arises!

How cool is that?