I’m a little sad, because there appears to be a dead phoebe bird in the nest above the door on the back porch. A few years ago, we actually had TWO phoebe nests on the back porch – the one over the door, and another one tucked into the back corner of the porch. And one summer, a phoebe took up residence in the nest in the back corner, where it decided to raise its little bird family all the way from egg to tentative flight. And at first, everything proceeded the way these things normally do – the phoebe would skittishly guard the nest by day, and fearlessly remain perched at its post all night (even if I walked outside with noisy, barking Echo…). And eventually, I could see the tops of fuzzy little baby bird heads poking out above the grassy, twiggy nest.
And then one morning I walked outside and one of the baby birds was lying on the porch. It was obviously not quite ready to fly, and it flitted aimlessly on the ground, unable to make much progress. As I looked around the backyard near the porch, I was disturbed to notice another baby bird underneath some bushes, only this one was dead. I (rather unceremoniously) plucked the dead bird off the ground with a plastic bag, and tossed it away (should I have given it a proper bird funeral? And what does a proper bird funeral consist of, exactly?). I then called my dad over to my house, and he climbed up on a ladder and placed the still-living baby bird back in the nest. I knew all that stuff about the mother bird ignoring human-touched baby birds was nonsense – since birds don’t exactly have a heightened sense of smell, and they really can’t tell if a human has been handling one of their offspring. (And even if they could, they probably wouldn’t care…) So I waited for the mom bird to return to the nest, to feed the remaining baby birds.
Except she never came back. And I started wondering if all that “don’t touch a baby bird because the mom won’t come back” stuff was true. What’s more, I noticed that those fuzzy little bird heads had stopped moving. So I called my dad back over to the house, he climbed back up the ladder, and this time he took down the whole nest – dead baby birds and all. He then proceeded to tell me that those baby birds hadn’t looked so good when he put the live bird back in the nest. And, apparently, “it smelled kinda funny.” Argh! Dad put the poor live baby bird back in a nest full of its dead siblings! It’s no wonder the mom had pushed a couple live birds overboard and flown away (I’m assuming the dead bird I found on the ground HAD been alive when it left the nest, because I found it quite a distance from the porch) – she was actually trying to SAVE the living birds from whatever had killed the rest of them. And then we go and throw that little baby bird right back into the baby bird chamber of horrors… what terrible stewards of nature we are…
Afterwards, I tried to think of why those birds might have died. The nest was off the ground, safe from any sort of predator, it wasn’t cold outside, and there are always plenty of bugs around so it’s not like food was scarce. But then I realized it might have actually BEEN the bugs – a couple weeks earlier, we’d noticed wasps building a nest in some cracks above the door. So Rick went outside and sprayed that whole area with Raid, on a day that was rather windy. And the wind was carrying the Raid mist over toward that bird’s nest in the corner. Those poor birds probably never had a chance… their nest must’ve been full of pesticide. (Again, we are terrible, terrible stewards of nature… we should just move to a downtown condo right now…)
But I’m confused about the dead bird in the nest today. It’s an adult bird, and it wasn’t there last night. So at some point in the middle of the night or early this morning, that bird flew up to the nest and just died there. We haven’t been spraying any Raid out there lately, so I know it’s not another bird-slaughter by pesticide. Do birds fly back to their nests to die? Maybe it was just this phoebe’s time to go. But it’s still a little disconcerting that things keep dying on my back porch…
So I know what dad will be doing tomorrow morning when he’s home from Dallas… I have the ladder ready…
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