Nesting Season

An ode to everyday awe

These past few weeks I’ve been watching two pairs of birds busily building nests in our backyard, and I have been riveted. I first noticed a pair of blue jays collecting grass and leaves from the yard, and so I watched them as they carefully and casually tried to sneak each piece to their nest without being noticed. I suspect this is to avoid egg predators, but I admired their creativity. The nest is in the crook of a branch, halfway up the silver maple tree. A nice, secluded spot covered with new green leaves, out of view of us humans, except for a tip of the beak or the edge of a tail as they flit about.

One morning last week after we’d been away for a few days, I came outside and noticed some long leaves of grass strewn around the entrance to the sun porch. I thought it was odd, because none of us had been pulling weeds and it wasn’t something that would fall idly off a shoe. The mystery was solved when I turned to go back inside and a bird had built a whole nest above the porch light, just inches from the door. In the days after I didn’t see any birds in it, and assumed they had decided this was too busy of a place to raise chicks. But this morning while I was sitting on the patio drinking a cup of coffee, I heard rustling from that direction, and slowly turned my head to see a robin perched there, carefully placing a new layer of grass in the nest. I was delighted that she had decided to stay despite the heavy foot traffic of our household.

There is something special about sharing our home with the birds. There is a pair of house finches who have raised chicks in the eaves of the front porch every year we’ve lived here, and we watch as the weeks pass and tiny little mouths poke up, waiting to be fed. And now we have three nests, with three different species, a triple blessing of life. I don’t really have a deep spiritual point in telling you this. Just that there are times when life’s beauty just about knocks me over, and perhaps the best place to be in awe is in one’s own backyard, in the presence of ordinary birds living their ordinary lives right next to us, oblivious to our angst and anger about the state of the world and our anxiety about daily failures. So I sit, and drink coffee, and appreciate the tiny miracle of bird life, unfolding before me.