Baby Birds

Stay at home life is not for me.

Three photos of a hysterical woman yawning. (CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Today is the second-to last weekday of the second half of my maternity leave. Other than the drudgery of the commute, I’m delighted that I’ll be returning to work next week. Staying home is not enough for me. I love my children, but my brain is dissolving. I’m so bored and anxious that I have become enmeshed a life-or-death drama involving baby birds.

My house is small, but it’s in a nice neighborhood on a nice street. It has a little yard and a large front porch and two raised garden boxes that I installed myself. I’ve finally figured out what kind of plants like to grow in there. I seeded the front yard with California poppies and a surprising number of them bloomed this year. My tomatoes are doing better than any tomato plants I’ve ever raised. The kale is going gangbusters. Around the front porch I’ve hung potted plants, most of which are doing well. It’s taken me years to figure out how to do all this. This is the best I’ve ever been at keeping plants alive. Of course I don’t get to enjoy it.

I noticed a few weeks ago that some tiny songbirds were spending a suspicious amount of time around the oldest and bushiest hanging plant– a pothos that really should be indoors, but that has hung on all this time despite its exposure to the wind. I suspected something was up with the plant because the birds started tweeting in alarm when I approached or when the dog flopped himself down on the couch a few feet away, which made me worry that those chirping morons were building a nest in there. I peered in and sure enough– the makings of a little nest. No eggs yet. I hoped they’d abandon it. I didn’t need the anxiety.

I bought a couple hanging birdhouses in an attempt to lure them away from the plant, and hung the bird houses close by. A few days later, I checked the plant again. The nest was more fully-formed. They were moving in. No birds have moved into the houses. Morons.

Some web research revealed that the little nesting birds are dark-eyed juncos. Unremarkable and common little birds that mostly eat bugs and build their nests in bushes low to the ground and don’t bother anyone. This makes them prime targets for ground-dwelling rodents and cats. Something like 85% of dark-eyed junco nests fail because of the stupid way they build their nests.

I peeked into the nest again, a few days later. Eggs.

Three of them, about the size of Whopper candies, but green with speckles. As I peeked in, the male junco flew inches from my face, like he was trying to scare me away, chirping with all the manliness he could muster.

I didn’t see them for a bit, and I didn’t dare check on the nest again, out of fear that I’d scared them away by getting too close to their nest too many times. I wanted them to come back. The hanging plant was, as far as junco nesting places goes, pretty safe compared to, say, a bush within easy reach of a cat. I held out hope that they hadn’t abandoned the nest; more junco research revealed that the birds distribute one egg in their nest every day or so until the clutch is complete. Then, the female bird sits on the eggs until they hatch. So it was possible that, despite all my nosiness, they’d return.

I have a lot of baggage around dead animals. When I was a kid, we kept chickens and sheep, and, for a short period of time, bunnies. This sounds like a sweet childhood activity if you don’t know anything about how terribly brutal farm life is. I have so many traumatic childhood memories of waking up to the carnage left by a weasel or owl that found its way into the chicken coop, of baby chicks that drowned in their water, of sheep dying of infections. The bunnies were snowed in during a blizzard and died. We always had a dog or two that mostly stayed outside to help keep an eye on things. One of our dogs got hit by a car and died. One of our dogs, at the end of his 14-year-life, walked into the pond in the corner of our huge yard and drowned.

A few days later, I noticed they’d returned, which was a relief, because the last thing I wanted to do was revisit my childhood of discovering dead baby birds where I was hoping to see alive baby birds. I’d become so invested in these stupid birds’ dumb little nest that I informed out-of-town family that was visiting that they were not to use the front porch at all, because it was a nesting site.

Yesterday I was sitting at the kitchen table and I heard panicked cheeping from the juncos. They’d directed it my way so often that I’d recognize it in a crowded room. To my horror, that a peregrine falcon was perched on the potted plant, his face inches from where I’d last seen the eggs. I ran to the door and threw it open, yelling NO! like an action movie star about to witness the bad guy win the day. The falcon flew off. I almost felt bad that I didn’t take time to appreciate how cool it was to be that close to a falcon, but I was too worried about that goddamn nest.

The birds were distraught.

I peered into the plant. I couldn’t tell what I was seeing at first. The nest was still intact, but inside the nest was what looked like four little pink balls with raised black spots. They were twitching. Babies! They’d hatched! They were alive!

Knowing that the falcon would almost certainly return to the easy four piece junco chick nugget meal awaiting him on my porch, I did one of the goofiest things I’ve done in my adult life: I found some wire fencing among my garden supplies and fashioned a few pieces into a round cagelike structure that I hung around the plant. The space between the wires was large enough for the juncos to fly through, but not big enough for a falcon or hawk. I brought the bottom together and secured it with the twine I normally use for trussing chickens before roasting them (ironic.) The entire time I was hanging this thing up and making it raptor-proof, the birds were dive bombing my face.

“I’m trying to save your stupid lives, you idiots,” I muttered as I strung up CD’s to further confuse the falcon. The naked baby birds opened their mouths and squeaked.

I appreciated that my husband didn’t point out that this entire exercise made me appear mentally ill or, at best, severely understimulated. But the rudimentary cage worked! Later that afternoon, I caught the falcon trying again, but crashing into the side of it before flying off. I haven’t seen it since. (It’s not that I don’t want the falcon to eat; I just don’t want him to eat these specific birds. All other birds are up for grabs, as far as I’m concerned.)

After baby juncos hatch, they’ll be ready to leave the nest somewhere between 9 and 13 days. After that, their parents will keep feeding them for a few weeks before they enter the wild themselves. But I won’t be able to witness it up close every day. I’m going back to work on Monday. Just in time to pull me back from the brink of insanity-lite. I won’t be here to watch for falcons or neighborhood cats in a kind of fucked up Mr. Rogers-meets-Rear Window situation. I’ve done everything I can for the little birds. I can’t wait until I can use my porch again. I can’t wait to use my brain again, for something other than worrying about tiny things.