During the COVID shutdown, Hubby and I discovered weird vandals had swathed our garage light with dead tiger lily leaves.
“You never know how quarantine boredom will affect some people,” he said.
Eventually, we discovered Courtney, a robin, wasn’t bored. She was constructing a nest.
She and Jason, her mate, must have flunked Nestbuilding 101. Their shapeless leaf pile dangled halfway to the ground.
No eggs or nestlings fell. Still, we felt sorry for the hardworking couple. Hopefully, they’d consult a new architect before trying that blueprint again.
“Looks like we hung shrunken heads on the garage,” I observed.
Eventually, the robins’ mess toppled.
Instead, Courtney and Jason built another amorphous mound of lily leaves, topped by a tipsy nest.
We held our breath as Courtney settled in. Don’t lean to the right! Or left! No heavy lifting. Raise your feet so they won’t swell!
Courtney took on a new-mama look: frazzled and frumpy, with missing feathers she’d worked into her nest. She probably couldn’t stand Jason, debonair in his neat, black-and-red suit. You did this to me!
Still, Jace babysat eggs and brought food to his grouchy spouse.
We grandparents-to-be grudgingly admitted the garage-light choice made sense. Under an overhang, the birds escaped bad weather. A perfect distance from the ground and roof, their abode protected them from interested neighborhood cats.
Those kids were smarter than we thought.
For Courtney, 14 days on the nest probably seemed like 14 years.
Then, it happened.
Hubby yelled, “Jason’s pecking at the nest!”
Our worry changed to celebration. Three tiny, wide-open beaks clamored for Daddy Jason’s tasty victual.
“Ya-ay-ay! Triplets!”
We did the Grandma-and-Grandpa Dance.
Unsure of their gender, we named the babies Ellie, Nellie and Belly — the last, the pushiest at dinnertime.
Their parents, making 100 trips a day to find food, didn’t care about their children’s preferences: “What, you think this is McDonald’s? Eat!”
They did. A lot.
Soon, they crowded the nest as if in the back seat of a VW Beetle. Before long, the triplets left home.
Impossible! A little sad. But even nasty viruses couldn’t banish our smiles as we witnessed that shiny, brand-new life. How glad we were that Courtney and Jason moved into our neighborhood!
Though, about that nest blueprint, kids. Maybe you should check out different ones the next time?
Your Extraordinary Ordinary: Have birds squatted on your property?
