It turns out we kept the little chickies after all. Only they’re not so little anymore; after a month they’re as big as their parents! It must be all the spinach they’re eating. Popeye was right after all!
It seems there are 3 females and 1 male, although not the ones we thought. The adult coloration is what best gives it away.
Since we’ve kept them, we naturally had to give them names. I love the name game! The first ones we thought of were Z names since they’re ZZZZebra finches. Zoe, Zulu, Zamba, Zebie (from Zebra)…We only stuck with Zoe and Zulu for the ones we designated “the twins” since they look alike.
I also thought of a name from a picture book I read growing up about a duck in China named Ping. We thought the brown one was male so we called it Ping, but now it looks like she’s a girl. Ping is not really a girl name but we just can’t seem to find anything else so she’s Ping. (We tried Ming and Ling and LingLing, I don’t know why we were shooting for Chinese with this one…)
The white one was the hardest. When she was a baby she was so clumsy and odd, definitely different from the others. It was so cute! I wanted to call her Ducky because it sounded so endearing but Jacob didn’t like it. Finally I tried thinking of everything that’s white. Snow, Himalaya, all sorts of mountain names, Alaska, Star, all sorts of constellations, Moon, Moonlight, Moonbeam, Windy, Milk, Cauliflower (who could live with a name like that?), Powder, Sugar, Salt, Cloudy, blah blah. I even stayed up in bed writing a list and looked online. Finally the next day we came up with Coco, as in coconut.
Now she’s not so clumsy anyway. Now she’s a botherer: she likes to bug the others, pecking at their beaks and tails and for some reason sitting on top of them.
You can see they’ve already hit puberty: their black beaks are turning orange and red and the male Zulu is getting the black bar markings across the front (“chest hair” Jacob said).
5 Responses
The Story About Ping? I love that one (although I’m not sure why–it is kind of a sad/weird story when you think about it).
I like the name Ducky too. She and Petri were the best characters on Land Before Time. (The first movie was good.) The pictures look great! Thank you for putting names at the bottom of the solo shoots, I had no idea which one you were talking about that before I saw those. So, how are you preventing more babies from coming along?
We have taken out their nest for good, and any egg that Sunny lays we just take out. The pet store people said they take out eggs all the time (apparently finches are the rabbits of the bird world aka constantly multiplying and replenishing the earth!)
Aww, they are all really cute. It will be fun to see them in person!
The thought just popped into my head about how you two are taking the nesting part of pregnancy quite literally, haha. 🙂
Hey, that is great to hear about the naming process. It reminds me of the names in Dr. Seuss’ books. We just used that theme for your dad’s birthday and it was fun. Dr. Seuss and your dad share the same birthday and love of books!!! A great inheritance.
Hope you check my other comment.