Terror and Hope in the Garden

I took the day off on Friday to get the yard ready for our Memorial Day picnic. I worked in the garden, planted some flowers, did some pruning and generally puttered around bringing order out of chaos.

After a while I realized that my activities were being accompanied by a chorus of birds chirping. Not songs, but determined chirping. Constant, shrill, alarmed chirping. I stopped and looked around to see what could be the cause of this racket. I spotted three robins carrying on to beat the band near the wisteria arbor, under which I spotted the dead body of a baby bird. It didn't look eaten or mauled but it was certainly dead. Since the body wasn't stiff, I figured it was a recent death. Under the watchful and noisy eyes of the adult robins I buried the little bird under a pile of nearby leaves and then, a bit more soberly, I went off to mow the lawn.

It took about an hour to mow and by then it was hot and I was ready to quit working. As I picked up all my tools, however, I was again bombarded with a chorus of birds chirping. Good grief, could the robins still be grieving the loss of the baby? I went to investigate and much to my surprise found a live baby bird just a foot or two away from where I had found the dead bird. I knew the live one had not been there before I went to mow the yard. So where had it come from? I looked around and, sure enough, there was a nest about three feet to the left of where the live bird was sitting. It was up about six feet on the wisteria arbor, so I figured it must have fallen or flown out of that nest and now was stuck on the ground. I didn't know what to do. Should I put him back in the nest? Leave him alone? Call the animal rescue people? The adult robins were hopping around and chirping like crazy at me. They clearly were watching out for the little one and viewed me with terror, so I decided to let nature run its course. I'd leave the bird alone but make sure our cat, Fetcher, didn't bother the poor little thing.

A couple of hours later I picked up Paul and Evan from school and they, of course, were excited about the bird. They fed it some worms, picked it up, and soothed it. Paul wanted to keep it but Evan was sure it didn't have enough feathers and would surely die. I tended to agree with Evan and didn't want Paul to be hurt when the bird died. But since the bird had lasted a few hours and had eaten something, I felt a bit of hope. I went in the house and searched the Internet for "birds out of nest" and found that baby birds with feathers are "fledglings" and that they frequently try to fly and fail, landing on the ground where they can stay for hours or even days. Their parents feed them until they can fly and many of these birds do end up flying away. The best thing to do, it seemed, was leave them alone and keep the family pets away from them. Well, we didn't have much control over Fetcher, but we could leave the bird alone. So that's what we did. The three of us wished the little fellow well and went about business while keeping an eye out for Fetcher who never did show.

Later that night, before I went to bed, I got a flashlight and went out to see the bird. It was gone! No body, not a feather in sight and no sign of struggle. I could and did hope that it had flown away to some place safe.

A little sign of hope in a world where it's easy to assume the worst.