A pair of robins built a nest in our yard in early April. It is crammed beneath the second story deck, and I can see it when I stand at the kitchen sink and wash dishes. The mother bird watches me, and I watch her and I feel a sort of communion with her. As if motherhood is universal and the lines between species don’t exist.
She and her partner spent a week flying back and forth building a beautiful nest, filled with everything they found in our yard. Dried lavender stalks and moss. I imagine it must smell wonderful.
Days later she began sitting in earnest and I knew there were eggs. It feels holy when a wild animal chooses to be near you. There is a deep feeling of connection. I whisper things to her while I wash dishes. “You are a good mother…I’m sorry I startled you…are you cold?”
She cocks her head and looks at me with her jet-black bead of an eye. I wonder if she is whispering to me too. “You are a good mother too…thank you for keeping me company…are you tired?”
One day it is raining, and I see her on the nest, with her wings spread out over the eggs and I almost cry, witnessing such maternal love.
The biophilia hypothesis infers that humans are always looking for a connection to nature. I look for signs of what is happening in the nest every day. A week ago, I thought I saw the beaks of small dinosaur-like babies in the nest. I searched the ground below and saw a flash of blue, shell fragments of the eggs.
Today, as I was washing the lunch dishes, the mother bird swooped beneath the deck, a worm in her mouth, and heads popped up. The babies are getting larger. Does the mother know, I wonder, that soon they will leave her? That she will feel both a sense of relief that she kept them safe when they were at their most vulnerable, and fear that soon she won’t be able to keep them from harm’s way, she will no longer able to spread her wings over the nest to keep them warm, safe, and dry?
I wonder, will she see my daughter return in a few weeks from college and feel a pang of longing? It feels only fair as I’ve stood in this window watching her, longing for the days when my daughter was a baby.
Books About Birds
I’ve always been drawn to birds. My daughter and I once spent a summer when she was a toddler, watching the birds at our bird feeder. We called it our bird sanctuary and kept journals of our observations, counting birds, drawing them.
Last weekend, for Mother’s Day we spent a few days on Whidbey Island. Again, we spent an afternoon, sitting on the porch, and trying to identify the birds we saw and heard on the Merlin Bird ID app.
If you are crazy for birds too, here are a few book recommendations:
The Bedside Book of Birds: An Avian Miscellany by Graeme Gibson: A beautiful collection of stories, non-fiction essays, art, and poems all about birds.
The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan: Unlike anything else you’ve read by Tan, this a book straight out of her personal bird watching journal and sketchbooks. It’s kind of unfair that she is as amazing an artist as she is a writer.
And if you are in the mood for a movie, this documentary about John James Audubon is fascinating.
At the check-out desk
Hello friends!
I hope spring is treating you well. We’ve had some lovely weather this spring and I’m eager to get into the garden. Besides the robins, we have lots of other visitors to our yard these days, including this year’s fluffle of bunnies, which consists of (at least in my head) a mother, whom we have named Primrose, and her two babies, one named Baby (because of it’s love of being in the corner-we couldn’t resist the Dirty Dancing reference) and Coco.
I’m also working on my Baking Mix Memories Series, having a great time revisiting my mother’s old Bisquick cookbook, writing about the memories they bring up and then inviting my friends over to eat the results. Last month, it was all about chocolate chip cookies and we hosted a lovely Cookies and Cocktails gathering which included large amounts of cookies and White Russian cocktails. The party was scheduled before dinner on a Friday evening and made us feel like the adults our inner children wished we would be-you know the kind who take advantage of the freedom of adulthood and eat dessert first or maybe just make cookies our dinners.
Next on the list is coffee cake and I’m hatching plans for an intimate coffee & cake break with local friends. I can’t wait!
Wahhhhhh baby birds
(excuse me while I go listen to Landslide on repeat and have a breakdown)
What a beautiful essay! I love your illustrated journal and your artwork. I love to watch for hawks, but never really understood birdwatching until I watched The Residence on Netflix - the main characters love for birds was inspiring, as is yours.