This spring a robin decided to build a nest in the viburnum outside my kitchen window. I enjoyed watching this family develop. The viburnum was so thick I couldn't get many pictures of the nest, but it was obvious that sharing a nest with aggressive siblings was not very romantic.
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Day after day, the parent birds tried to satisfy the babies' seemingly unquenchable appetities. The babies seemed to be getting quite fat, and late one morning I saw one venturing outside the nest.

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Soon another ventured out, and later that day the nest was empty. I thought that I wouldn't see them again, but several days later I saw the mother robin with a baby, seemingly showing it how to peck on the ground. But the baby flew to a lower branch of the bush where it was born, and just plopped down, when papa came and fed it a worm. That same day I discovered another baby come back to the lower branches waiting to be fed.

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The next day I saw the mother with two babies in the grass. It was apparent that mother and baby sometimes had disagreements.

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But mother was still attentive to and proud of her babies:
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The biggest lesson I learned is that, with robins too, babies may leave the nest, but still come back to freeload. Parental chores do not end so abruptly.

Today, I notice that several babies have gone to the bush, but the parents are not feeding. Maybe the time has finally come to be self-reliant.