Reflections on the Tenth Week of Spring - Nesting

    The week's nesting adventures started with a fat robin. It grabbed the string marking the third potato row, pulled, and flapped backwards. The string slipped out of the robin's beak. The robin tried again. Because Spence tightened the string to get it off the ground, I couldn't count how many times the robin would try for that nesting material before giving up.

    All over Wells Wood, I walked past birds sitting on nests–in willows, maples, the old pine stand, the evergreen nursery, the woods, and on three corners of the log house. The robin on the nest above the porch steps flew away every time I stepped out the front door. The phoebe on a nest above the guest room window flew away when I checked the first pink iris blooms in the front yard. But she didn't abandon her eggs when Spence hammered the last boards in the guest room floor. The mourning dove, nesting under the eaves above the bedroom, used a different strategy. When I approached with camera and zoom lens, she crouched over her babies and sat possum-still. On my third visit, though, she sat beside the baby birds staring at me as if proud of her children or confident I couldn't fly up to pester them. The fourth corner of the house, between the porch and deck, had the only nest without a sitting bird. No doubt, the prowling-through-pansies and arthritis-sunbathing antics of our cat George convinced the nest builders to try another location.

    Birds did need to protect their nests.

    My awe in a Red-tailed Hawk circling the blue sky with wings spread so feathers extended like fingers turned to dread. It dove and met a screeching ruckus. Dwarfed by the hawk, four robins chased it across the north garden and over the west field. Two more scolding robins zoomed in from the south garden. The six pursued the hawk till it perched atop a tall maple in the woods.

    A baby Blue Jay could have used that robin posse. In the grass near the old pine stand lay its four inch gray skinned body with dark blue wing feathers and a fuzzy black streak down its head and back.

    Though I didn't need to ward off a Red-tailed Hawk–just duck from swarms of buzzing carpenter bees, I prepared for nesting too. I potted a red Chilean Jasmine and orange Firecracker plant then set them on the deck. I washed the sliding glass door and went inside to turn on my camera and focus the zoom lens. Nestling in my Adirondack chair, I waited.

    A female Ruby-throated Hummingbird found the Firecracker plant the next morning. She hovered and sunk her beak into the long slender orange flowers four or five times a day giving me plenty of tries, before she streaked away, to lift the camera to my eye.