Love and Hate with Nature
I decided this spring that I have a love/hate relationship with nature. What brought this to a head: Live plants…dead birds.
Poking out a hungry head.
We usually have a nest somewhere around our house each Spring, used to be on a folded back screen on an upstairs balcony door…we took off to North Carolina, something we’d been doing since the nineties, and return to find a the robins had been at work building their Spring home. It was always wonderful to keep an eye on the nest. The last year we had that screen it was Blue Jays! I couldn’t go out on the Juliet balcony or I’d get dive bombed, when they fledged I couldn’t go in my garden for three days or I’d still get dive bombed and hit on the head!
This year we watched as this Robin couple built the nest in a very precarious spot – atop a slightly pointed little solar light – but they stood firm and got it done. I worried about it in inclement weather and high winds…but, no, it held firm. Last week they hatched and we started to see a lot of feeding, as I dug in my garden I’d leave out any worms I found, bugs were found…somewhere. These three hungry little so and so’s would stretch their scrawny necks what seemed like yards long, to get that first bite of lunch. Yesterday we even started to hear louder peeping…and looked forward to them fledging. We were quiet, went in and out of our back door carefully, or out another door. Hanging a plant yesterday…I didn’t think but realized how close I was when a couple of heads stretched up and peeped…so I stayed away.
This morning, my husband, who gets up earlier than I do, came to tell me they were gone, the nest on the deck and not under the eves, we thought it must have been a couple of weeks though I didn’t think they were quite ready…awwww…I missed them. Then I went on the deck to look at the fallen nest and right next to it was a mess of entrails and a couple of tiny bird feet!!!!! Something had attacked these little ones and, I guess, eaten them. It must have been a bigger bird or a small raccoon as this was not a spot a cat could get to. At that moment I hated nature.
When I came back from an early morning run for some groceries (my neighbour’s rhubarb is ripe and I needed some strawberries to make a rhubarb-strawberry pie) I decided to haul the pots up from the basement that I hauled down there in the Fall. I hate COVID 19 but the lockdown and stay home means I actually was consistent in watering my spikes and geraniums, and my husband found a great grow light he’d bought ages ago but we hadn’t used…..the white one is magnificent!!!! There’s a Hate/Love there.
