Robin Richmond Mason: A fragile harmony

Published 11:00 am Sunday, July 11, 2021

Where is the best place for a bird to build a nest? A nest should probably be at least eight feet off the ground, and out of direct sunlight. It would be optimal if the supportive structure were sturdy and near an abundant food and water supply.

Preferably, the nest should be well hidden from discovery and impossible for predators to reach. I don’t know if these are the selection criteria that a parent bird uses when selecting a building site because I have never taken a single course in ornithology. I wish that I had and maybe I will, someday. But for now, surmise it to say that I do know one definite nest-building criterion. What I do know is that birds should not build nests in porch containers attached to homes with resident cats.

We have large, beautiful, white wire hanging pots filled with luscious scarlet geraniums around our front and side porches. A local flower shop has planted these oversized botanical marvels for us, for years. Suspended 10 feet above the porch floor, the layers of foliage are always deep green and the abundant red blossoms spike and drape from the edges of the pots. I water the plants in the morning and evening of each day and no visitor to our home can leave without a visual tour of the decadent display.

Last year, a pair of little gray/brown wrens found the gorgeous hanging pots irresistible. Despite good reason and ample feline evidence, they built their home in one of my geranium baskets.

The nest construction and egg sitting phases were interesting. We watched the mom and dad dashing in and out of the pot with tiny treasures. They twittered and worked and worked some more. I wondered if one of the pair was in charge of the design strategy and if I was actually seeing the same bird securing and delivering all of the materials while the other bird wove and packed the nest. See now why I’ve come to think that ornithology should be a required course for any reasonably educated person? There is so much to learn and know. Birds of many varieties are all around us. They sing, soar, land, flitter and croon as we dully ignore our ignorance.

Why a set of dutiful parents would place their young fledglings on a human porch is an area of my ignorance. Last year, I found the downy soft feathery remains of the baby birds on the ground near the porch. I concluded that one of our cats had noticed the vulnerability of the chicks during an initial flight lesson.

The cat had an easy catch, and the bird parents entered the empty nest experience, prematurely. I wanted to beat my cats for being vicious hunters when they are well fed with their favorite cuisine. Strange thing that I praise the cats when they slaughter a field mouse and then lecture them when they kill a baby bird.

So, that tragedy belonged to last year. There were other hard events in that year. It might have been fitting that even the baby birds would be eaten during such a sufferable year.

This year could have been different. We left the hanging location of last year’s tragedy vacant. I did not see a single wren fly near that end of the porch. But, wouldn’t you just know it? Another hanging pot location was selected for the residential construction project.

By May, a pair of expectant parents were busily dashing in and out of the geranium blossoms. By June, we could hear the distinct chirping of the babies. Last Saturday morning, Rodger and I watched the sun come up from the porch swing. We also watched as the parent birds silently entered and exited the hanging basket. They brought a continuous stream of dew-covered beetles into the nest.

Each meal delivery prompted a short but certain chorus of feeding requests just before one of the chicks received the morsel. Then the parent was off again to find another beetle.

As we listened, Rodger and I concluded that there seemed to be the voices of three babies coming from the nest. A careful auditory discrimination revealed three slightly different voices, all full of life and hunger.

Oh well. That was on Saturday. On Tuesday, the bird family must have discussed the fun of flying. When I came outside to water each geranium basket, the chicks were perched on the edges of their basket home. The water flowed over the plant, just as it had twice each day, for two months.

On this occasion, the three baby birds reacted to the watering as a prompt to fly. Of course their skills were limited and the flight paths only took them to the porch floor where two swift felines sat watching. The ensuing scene of panic, rescue, calls for reinforcement, murder and cat vilification can not be adequately penned.

I grabbed one baby as a cat grabbed another. My frantic call for help brought children scampering out the door (it is just too bad that we didn’t have the windows open). We shook the cat until it dropped its prey, only to see another snatched and mortally wounded by the other feline, within seconds. We all mourned the tiny bleeding chick with a certainty that nothing could be done for a baby bird with a broken and slashed neck. Those wretched, wicked cats!

We placed the living babies gingerly back into the nest and watched silently from inside the house. The loud and obviously alerted bird sounds continued from the magnolias that surround our porch. Then within minutes, one of the parent birds dashed into the nest basket. The parent reemerged and took a spokesman’s place at the top of the hanging chain. He twittered out a message and the other parent arrived within seconds, with a beetle.

See? It is true that I know nothing about feathered vertebrates. My naturalist education has always told me that a parent bird will abandon its offspring because of the smell of a human touch. This my kind, reading friend is not an all inclusive fact. No doubt it is partially true but it was not the case on Tuesday. The parents ignored both the scent of human hands and the saliva from a cat’s mouth when they resumed the normal care of their chicks.

The fragility of birds building homes at a people house and right over the heads of cats strikes me as certain disaster. That has been the case for two years in a row. The good news of the story is that we saved two baby birds and that the partially forgiven felines were caged for a few days as the remaining babies perfected their flight and left the hanging basket forever. One of our children selected Matthew 10:29 as the first Bible verse that was ever memorized.

This summer, 2021, we have increased our vocabulary to describe an unsettled world. Before now, we didn’t speak of “cancel culture” or “The Woke Movement.” Come to think of it, most of us would like to erase the need for our expanded knowledge of COVID variants, viruses and vaccines.

The little bird family on the porch has called me back to faith and trust. The world is a dangerous place. We need to make right choices and to be vigillantly aware of danger. Even more than that awareness, we must remember that God is in control. Faith trumps fear.

If the Holy Scripture has space to remind me that God sees and cares about every sparrow that falls, then I know that he is watching over me and these times of fragile harmony in our country.

Robin Richmond Mason grew up in the Beaverdale community of Whitfield County. She resides with her husband and four children in Paint Lick, Kentucky, and teaches at Eastern Kentucky University. She can be reached via email to beaverdalecolumn@yahoo.com.