Last week I wrote about a mother bird, a robin, who made a nest outside our kitchen window many years ago. She continued to use our back porch as her home for several years in a row, and I developed something like a bond with the bird, even if I did usually feel like she was judging me.
The robin was aloof, seldom making eye contact. But the way she slowly turned her head when my three boys argued at the dinner table spoke volumes about her disapproval. And I envied the bird’s ability to keep her babies — all of them, with each successive year — in check. They ate whatever she presented them, and they stayed neatly in their nest.
The robin’s well-behaved children (forgetting all the mud they flung onto my back porch) made me question my own mothering and why my children would run through the backyard with foam swords or play baseball with the dog’s toys. Sometimes, I wanted to yell up at the mother bird, who was peering down her beak at my children, and say, “Oh yeah, well, you can just sit on your babies and keep them still!”
The robin, of course, wasn’t a perfect mother either. But I couldn’t always see that back then. She never cleaned up the aforementioned mud. I had to clean it up myself that July. And when her babies got too big for the nest, they sent bits of grass and twigs flying down onto the porch below them. She never cleaned that up either.
Then one year, the mother robin did not return. We had built an addition onto the back of our house, and that meant the bird’s perch on our porch had to come down. It was a sad, unintended consequence for me. I had secretly grown to love that bird, and I bet she’d be impressed with how quiet my kids are now, always walking around with headphones on, texting friends, and only speaking to ask, “What’s for dinner?”
This spring, a new bird made her nest in a birdhouse just outside the room we added on years ago. The MAINE Birds Facebook group told me she is a white-breasted nuthatch. She is quirky and funny, moving with jerky little steps and turns of the head. She scales the birdhouse like Spiderman and likes to stare quizzically at me with her exceptionally long beak.
I’ve clocked a lot of hours (hours I didn’t have when the mother robin was there) watching this new bird nurture her babies. I have the time to now. All three of my boys are usually off doing their own thing, and none of them are interested in coming to see a bird’s nest the way they did when they were young and the robin lived there. So it’s just me and this perky nuthatch and her demanding little babies.
Lately, they peek their heads out the hole of the house, showing off their newly sprouted feathers, and the comical look on their faces assures me they are the nuthatch’s own.
The mother is very busy feeding them, and sometimes she cocks her head to the side when she looks at me, as if she’s begging me not to judge her or the bits of nest that are spilling out of her home.
In between her many flights to get food, I look out at the backyard and remember when my boys would play Wiffle ball there. It’s as if I can still hear their little voices fighting over Nerf swords or who’s “it” next. I can almost see all their toy dump trucks and bicycles strewn across the yard. I bet the robin would have remembered those, too.
But these days, my yard is quiet and still — except for the nuthatch and her brood.
The babies are getting feistier now. They squawk nearly nonstop, and the mother can barely make enough trips with food to suit them. When the mother comes hopping in, with a clamor of squawks herself, I nod knowingly at her.
They say you can tell when baby birds will fledge because their chirps get deeper and they are hungrier faster than the parents can provide. It is the same way with human children. My own yell out the screen door at me to ask when dinner will be ready, and I have to pull myself away from the little nuthatch and her babies.
Sometimes, when I’m on the back porch watching, I look deeper into the forest, beyond our yard, and I wonder if the robin is out there. Does she have new babies? Or is she, like me, too old for babies now? Is her life quitter like mine?
The nuthatch will come back with another delivery for her babies, disrupting my thoughts. The birdhouse grows noisy again, and the mom is flustered.
But I just smile. For all my battles with the robin, I know if she was out there watching that she’d long, like me, to tell this young, anxious mother, “Slow down. Relax. It’s going to be OK. You’ve got this. And it goes by so very fast.”
Comments are not available on this story.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
