Day 0: Bewick's wren mom feeds newly hatched chicks April 17, 2025 with sound, captured with iPhone

A bird nest is in the dawn redwood tree of the JMZ Dinosaur Garden. Birds are the closest living relatives to the dinosaurs. Indeed, most scientists consider birds to be dinosaurs that survived the asteroid strike on the Yucutan Peninsula 66 million years ago, the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction. You are watching an actual dinosaur nest!

February 23: Nest building begins
March 29 - April 2: Eggs laid
April 3-17: Incubation
April 17: Hatching
May 6: Fledging?

The nesting bird is a Bewick's wren (pronounced like the car, Buicks). Audubon named the wren after his engraver friend, Thomas Bewick. You might see the Bewick's wren quickly flitting from ground to shrub to branch, probing for insects. It's known for its long, straight upturned tail with spotted stripes, narrow white over-the-eye stripe, long and narrow curved beak, and clear melodic warbling songs.

Bewick's Wren:
https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/B...
(click Listen button there to hear its call)

The Palo Alto Junior Museum and Zoo is a science museum and small zoo with an emphasis on childhood education. The museum includes the California Dinosaur Garden in an outdoor courtyard centered on a large dawn redwood tree, which carries the nesting box.

The dawn redwood, or metasequoia, is native to Hubei province in China, and is the only deciduous redwood (it loses its leaves in the winter). For a long time these types of redwoods were known only as fossils and thought to be extinct. Living dawn redwoods was identified in China in the 1940s, making them "living fossils" that have become popular ornamental trees word-wide.

The courtyard also includes interpretive exhibits, prehistoric plants, and several life-size dinosaur sculptures, including an Ichthyornis, a toothed plunge-diving sea bird; a Pteranodon sternbergi, a huge flying reptile; and Hypsilophodontids, deer-sized herd animals. These dinosaurs were common in California during the Cetaceous period.

The 19th-century discovery of Archaeopteryx in Germany provided the "missing link" between dinosaurs and birds. It it considered by some to be the earliest bird fossil, having wings and feathers like modern birds, but with dinosaur skeletal structure, including teeth. It lived about 150 million years ago.

Palo Alto Junior Museum and Zoo home page:
https://www.paloaltozoo.org/Home

Dawn redwood (Metasequoia):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaseq...

Origin of birds:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_...

Archaeopteryx:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeo...

California fossils:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleont...

Museum & Zoo donations:
https://www.paloaltozoo.org/Get-Invol...