By BILL NEWMAN
“I’m never doing anything this stupid for you ever again.” My wife Dale announced this to me last summer as we peeled out of the driveway, late to catch a plane.
Blame the robins. A couple had built a nest and laid eggs in the rhododendron bush, inconveniently located for breeding and egg-sitting purposes between our back door and the garage – our noisiest and busiest possible location. Note to robins: you chose this neighborhood.
But forget the traffic and the noise. Another problem loomed.
Baby robins, we learned, don’t magically fly from the nests when they feel big and strong enough – about three weeks after hatching. Rather, the first time they try, they tend to fall and flop. If they land on soft ground, they get to try again. The basement metal bulkhead doors directly below our robins’ nest seemed to unduly diminish their odds, and Dale – having succumbed to my groveling and importuning – had driven that morning to Jaescke’s Farm Stand to pick up two bales of straw to spread over our bulkhead and the driveway.
“Never again,” Dale repeated, in case I’d been slow on the uptake.
What a difference a year makes! This summer we have no robins’ nests. Living is easier.
Not so fast. Recently Dale pointed at a small bird – then two – heading towards the eve above the awning on our back deck. Out came Stokes’ “Field Guide to Birds.” Red on his head and upper breast, broad brown lines stretching on his lower breast and flanks, a short bill, a twittering call – “We have finches!” Dale exclaimed.
More specifically, we have been hosting “house finches.” These are birds marketed in metropolitan New York in the 1930s as “Hollywood Finches.” They have an Al Capone-ish history.
Hollywood Finches were never a breed but rather were a marketing artifice. Those birds could barely survive in a cage and weren’t produced in Hollywood. The feds for reasons not well understood were all atwitter about all this but the bird breeders, having been tipped off that the feds were about to bust them, released their finches. Previously unknown outside of cages in the eastern part of the country; there now are hundreds of millions of them.
Meanwhile, back at our awning: opening and closing it scared the bejesus out of the birds. So for weeks we’ve left it open, resulting in piles of bird poop accumulating on top of it. Scarier to me is the metal grill on the porch under the eve. I mentioned this to Dale.
“No straw, this year. Not happening. No way. Forget it.” I surmised that we had arrived at her final offer.
A few fewer finches in the world – would it matter? I asked myself. According to a recent editorial in the Gazette, the answer is not much.
The American Bird Conservancy reports that in the United States every year 600 million birds die in collisions with windows. Another 200 million are done in by cars. Twenty-five million meet their demise with power lines. Another 6.6 million collide with communications towers. And all these numbers are dwarfed by the number of birds killed by domestic cats – 2.4 billion!
Twenty-five or 30 years ago, when Dale and I were reading books to our then-young kids, a family favorite told the story of a really big egg (clearly not the bird’s) that somehow ended up in a bird’s nest. The mother and father bird cogitated and debated about the ethics and practicalities of the egg that clearly wasn’t theirs and concluded that when there’s an egg in your nest, you sit on it. Lesson learned.
When there may be eggs in a nest in your awning, you let the birds be, and do what you can to let them sit on the eggs.
For the nonce Roxy, our tabby, has been banned from the back deck. I’ve moved the grill. And when I see the male finch in the nest (although in the last few days he seems to be falling down on the job), I encourage him to carry on and tell him that he’s a credit to his gender.
But this year sentimentality will not reign. I know now that a robin’s nest is not a home but rather merely an incubator and unadorned nursery. After the babies fledge and fly, all the robins leave.
Sometimes, though, robins do live their lives near their birthplace, and so now when we see robins in our backyard, as we often do, Dale and I quietly ask them, “Are you our robins?” And secretly we are glad that we bought the straw.
Bill Newman is a Northampton lawyer, host of a WHMP weekday program and author of “When the War Came Home.” His column appears the first Saturday of the month. He can be reached at opinion@gazettenet.com.