sculpting, watering, and herding baby birds

I'm still model making, sculpting in wax. I'm nearly finished with Drowned Feather 4 which isn't actually a feather but a fern frond. 

I had picked out four photos of the many that I took of feathers the summer I spent a week on the Oregon coast with some friends and then I saw a picture that Jennifer Tetlow, the stone sculptor who's piece I bought, Flutter, posted on her blog that she took of a drowned fern frond on an outing to the beach 

and I thought that would be a nice little twist. So that's how I came to use a fern frond instead of a feather for the fourth panel.

I'm still having to water the yard every day as it has been weeks since we got any rain. It's anole hatching season and I've been seeing the itty bitty just hatched babies scurry away from the water spray. So tiny, maybe 2” from nose to tail tip. 

It's also baby toad season. I've been seeing them too in the mornings when I water. The little things are about 1/2” long.

The other thing that happened last week was baby wrens. I had seen the wrens in the garage but didn't think much about it as they are often in the garage and will even come in the house when the door is open but one day they were screeching their alarm call and when I went out to investigate I heard a little peeping and discovered a baby wren in the garage. Turned around and there was another baby and they both looked too young to have fledged. There is a nest they built years ago on top of the motor housing of the broken garage door opener and sometimes they use it and sometimes not. So I climbed on the table and put the two little ones back in the nest with their nest-mate. 

The next morning all three of the babies had fallen out as the nest was completely open on one side. I scooped them up and put them in a towel lined box under the nest where they stayed for another day and a half while their parents attended to them. 

So I thought I would change out the poopy towel for a clean one and nudged the babies aside and changed the towel and when I tried to grab them and put them back on the towel two of them fluttered up and out and scurried off. Found one and put it back, found the other and went to put it back and then the other two jumped out and away. Tried one more time to locate them in the garage and put them back in the nest and just gave up. It was like herding cats. So I figured if they were that determined then they were old enough and I considered them fledged. The parents located all three and herded them out into the big world where I saw them along the side of the house later in the day. By evening they were around the front on the opposite corner.

Well, tomorrow, Monday, I go back to the cardiologist and get the heart monitor and then back again on Tuesday to turn it in and then get the stress test. I'll be glad when I'm done with all this testing.