Lady Bird

I now find myself thinking about the nesting blackbirds that have set up home right outside ours at least five hundred times a day. They have nested in my mind. At 3am this morning this saw me Googling facts and literary quotes about nesting birds, the first of which was this bleakly realist offering from Virginia Woolf: ‘The bird sat on the nest. The tree swung. One egg fell out. Everything seemed as it always had been, but everything was changed.’

I’d say there’s a hundred percent chance that some blackbirds nested in Woolf’s garden that spring back in 1931 because that is the dread fear, perfectly described, of a fellow nest-worrier. Death’s extraordinary power to change everything and nothing, the seeming randomness of it all, and the seismic significance of its insignificance. It’s like trying to comprehend the vastness of the Universe only to be overwhelmed by the extremity of your own fluttering insignificance.

Chekov gives us, ‘He watched the bird sitting on the nest, so motionless it seemed part of the tree,’ which is poetically functional I suppose, but I think my favourite in terms of its generalised bubbly optimism is this one from Atwood: ‘There’s something in the act of building a nest. It’s hope made visible.’ But more on that later.

I also learned that it is the female blackbird that does all the heavy lifting. She builds the nest, lays her clutch of blue-green eggs, and then incubates them alone for around two weeks, the male keeping watch near-by, all of which seems embarrassingly ‘1950s dad’. Once born, the chicks are altricial – both blind and featherless – and grow rapidly, hence why some pairs will raise two or even three broods in a single season. In terms of graduating from flight school, the chicks will fledge at fourteen days and more worrying still, often before they can fly.

This is the part that sent a chill down my spine and also explains why we sometimes see scruffy juveniles loafing about in the garden being fed by an exhausted parent while demonstrating a frankly suicidal unwillingness to fly.

This means that Deborah and I will potentially have several ostensibly ground-dwelling, hopelessly naïve blackbird fledglings hopping about in our covered area in the next ten days or so. I had hoped that by the time they were ready to leave the nest they would at least be able to make it over to the gap above the plastic siding where the parents have been entering and exiting, whereas it now seems much more likely that they will merely tumble to the ground, and remain there exposed and vulnerable to cat predation while audibly demanding to be fed.

Trouble is, we can’t close-off this area to the cats without also trapping the birds. The gap where the birds enter is also used by Mort, our male cat, and I can’t reduce it in size without making it impossible for the birds to hit their landing. As it stands, they already have to perform a mid-air ninety-degree turn, and any further modifications could prove disastrous. Mort also has another couple of options entrance-wise, and experience has taught us that if you try to block any of these he will dedicate himself, in way that defies his tendency towards extreme laziness, to finding a solution, including the fashioning of a skeleton key or subterranean tunnelling. So, cat-proofing the area is out of the question. All I can think to do is to erect some elevated bird-sized platforms that these dumb-ass fledglings can bobble onto and out of feline reach. I will rig some ladders for this purpose, since the cats won’t be able to climb up and the rungs will be helpfully sized for small bird feet. My only other option, and the one that I fear may be waiting for me in the near future, is that of a 24-48 hour vigil.

I just can’t cope with the idea of seeing these little guys massacred. I’m sure we’ve all encountered a lost fledgling. A horrible heart-breaking experience. A few years back, when the cats were mere kittens, we came down to breakfast to find Mags howling in triumphal regret at having brought us an offering still covered its adolescent downy fluff. I hated cats that morning. Thankfully that was the only time, but I imagine that the predatory temptation of finding a grounded fledgling must be overwhelming, even amongst senior citizen felines whose hunting days are now spent in search of chin scratches and sunbeams. But that’s the worry that I have, that something will take one or both of the parent birds and doom the eggs to rot unmothered in the nest, or that the soon-to-be fledglings will succumb.

Last year we had blackbirds nest in the palm tree at the bottom of the garden. We would sit in our garden chairs beneath its jagged rustling canopy and watch their feeding runs, each arrival accompanied by the hysterical peeps of hungry young. It was joyous. And then one morning I went out to check on them and found the male lying amongst the weeds, a telltale explosion of small auburn feathers catching in spiders’ webs.

Returning to Attwood I’m not sure a nest symbolises hope. Perhaps it is more accurate to think of it as nature fulfilling its promise to itself, a symbol of routine yet daring purpose without the satisfaction of a larger philosophical rationale. To me a nest – The Nest – is loaded with precarity and an accompanying vulnerability that means I worry about them because I know they are, and danger surrounding them. Woolf put it better. It is Nature playing its hand, a game of chance, because isn’t it always so? It is no more hopeful than anything else that we do; we just trust that one day will follow the next and roll the dice. Birds live on their nerves, and yet to have to remain in one place, your presence constantly announced must represent a curious form of agony, your instincts enflamed, the impulse for self-preservation and legacy warring with each other.

I had sworn never to get involved again, especially after the awful baby-pigeon episode of last year, to always let Nature take its course, but the thought of the fledglings…

Whatever else it might be, a nest is also home to anguish and fear, and as much as I am happy to see this little drama unfold my hope is that they nest somewhere else next time.