RIVER CITY JOURNAL: HEY! HAVE YOU SEEN MY PICTURES? GOT AN HOUR? OR TWO?

The three baby cardinals are always ready to eat.

OK. Here's my excuse for the bird photos.

I don't have grandchildren.

So there.

I could go on and on about the baby birds and their attentive and industrious parents. But you probably have nests full of baby birds in your yards too. So I won't bore you with all my baby-bird stories.

There's one thing about our feathered neighbors I can't help but mentioning: Only their mothers could love baby birds.

My wife's maternal instincts flashed the other night when I made a similar comment. She was using a mirror to check on the baby cardinals, because the nest atop our back-door wreath is too high to look into without standing on a chair.

"Don't you want to look?" she asked.

I said the baby birds were ugly as sin.

"They are not! They are perfect little creatures!"

I sank a little lower in my La-Z-Boy.

So by now you've figured out that the cardinal eggs in the nest on our back door hatched.

We discovered the little birds Sunday afternoon. We knew something had happened, because Mama Cardinal's behavior changed drastically. While she had eggs in her nest, she didn't want to leave them alone even when we came close. Now that the baby birds are in the nest, Mama Cardinal makes every effort to divert our attention. She flies off to the wild hedge several feet away and scolds us.

Here's more good news: Papa Cardinal is part of the family again. We didn't see much of him while the nest was being built or while the eggs were being hatched. But he was right their stuffing those hungry mouths as soon as the babies hatched. And he's been at it ever since.

After five days, the baby birds have grown enough that we can see their heads over the top of the nest without a mirror. Their eyes still aren't open, but they've started peeping.

I continue to be amazed and fascinated by this cardinal family. It's hard not to be interested in their welfare when you have to pass just inches from the nest every time you go in and out of the house.

My wife thinks we may have to have a locksmith change the locks on the front door. We don't have a key to that door, and we may have to stop using the back door once the baby birds get big enough to test their wings.

Meanwhile, we've contacted a painter about repainting the doors to our house. But now we wonder how the painting project can proceed around the parenting project in the grapevine wreath overlooking our patio.

I wish anyone thinking about having a baby could see everything I've seen in the past few weeks as the cardinal couple became parents. I wish parents-to-be could observe the effort, attention, devotion, seriousness, responsibility and courage it takes to be a mother or a father.

It's interesting how pea-brained birds understand this while so many of us humans, with brains the size of cantaloupes, don't.

Enough of that.

There is one thing anyone who knows me can be thankful for:

I don't own a video camera.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.