Some new tenants

The first summer we were here, Hugo, Amelia and Roo found an empty robin's nest on the ground with some left over broken pieces of egg. We scanned eagerly for fresh, in-use nests but no luck. In fact, there weren't many robins either. We saw lots of various birds by the stream and at our feeders, but robins were in short supply.

Last year, same thing.

But this year, the robins are back. I suspected something was up when I observed three robins repeatedly perching on the trees & shrubs in the front garden, and flying off with 6 inch long twigs towards the back.

Turned out they were building a high density housing development.
This is the underside of our deck and if you look closely, you'll see three nests perched up there. Actually since I took that photo, I have observed that there are signs of two more in the beginning stages of construction.
I'm not sure what the actual family unit consists of in this case. I observed three robins hanging around but as I'm sure you know, robins all kind of look the same, so I couldn't tell if these were three males, building three nests to impress some female hanging around, or if this is some west coast alternative family grouping, or if these were manic birds who just enjoyed building. Because in the end, only one nest is occupied, the one closest to the creek side. They're all the same, perched against the eastern side of the beams, all the same size. I wonder how Ms. Robin made her choice as to where to lay her eggs?

We've observed someone sitting on the eggs but haven't managed to get a photo of that, so all you get is these brown twigs & green wood. All that green on the posts and beams is a combination of pressure treated wood (which looks greenish) and the greeny slimey algae stuff that eventually appears on everything around here. But I can't pressure wash now, can I? (yesss! another boring tedious chore delayed!)
This is the view from above. Hugo suggested that we peel back the decking so that we could peek. Um, no.
If you press your eye against the cracks in the decking (watch out for slivers as the dogs have been trashing the deck), this is what you'll see. There are at least two eggs there, maybe three.

On Monday evening, the first baby was observed. All we can see is a small triangle thing waving around (that would be the beak) and if we put our ear to the boards, we can hear teeny chirps.

Now, as excited as we are, these are lame photos and because of the location of this nest & my reluctance to a) tear up the deck or b) build a complicated periscope camera, we're not going to get much better. So I'm sending you to this photo blog, where the robins were much more cooperative about nesting in a camera accessible place.