The Bird

When Tricia, the kids, and I first came to South Carolina we moved into a new-construction home in the suburbs of Northeast Columbia. While our community had thousands of families, the street we built on was nowhere near full capacity. In fact, there were no other houses within five or six lots in any direction. It was nice being surrounded by all those trees. We were nestled back in the woods. That is until the lots started selling and the bulldozers began to knock down trees by the hundreds.

It was sad to see. In just a few hours a crew of three or four guys could reduce a quarter acre of trees to a sandy lot littered with upturned roots and spent Gatorade bottles. You always knew when this was set to happen because someone would come out and tag the property for clearing. I know trees do not have feelings but it was still a bit heartbreaking to sit on the porch and look at all those trees knowing what was soon to come.

A few times I drug a shovel and a collection of five-gallon buckets over and tried to save the smallest of those trees. I'd dig and dig and dig. I quickly found out that the tap root of a pine tree grows straight down into the ground and is just about as long as the tree is tall. Still, I wiped the sweat out of my eyes and worked until I had a tree in each bucket to bring back home.

I tried to transplant the first batch of trees into our backyard. They died. I tried another batch. They died, too. I took the next batch to school and set them in the courtyard just outside my classroom door. My class and I made it our duty to save these trees.

Hey, you're like the Lorax. You speak for the trees! my teammate said. Then she laughed at the sight of those three sad trees - all brown and looking as though they might make great kindling.  

Except that instead of saving the trees you seem to kill them! she added.

She was right. All I accomplished was prolonging the agony. At least the bulldozer was swift.

These failed attempts reminded me of the time when I was seven or eight and found a small blue robin egg on the ground. I brought it into my bedroom and tried to keep it warm under my pillow until I could create a box to keep it in. I filled the box with an assortment of t-shirts and grass. I carefully placed the egg in the box and then set the box under a small desk lamp, turned it on, and waited.

Nothing.

I waited for a week or two but there was never so much as a small wiggle. When I had given up hope that my baby bird would emerge I cracked open the egg to see what was inside. It just a bunch of gloop (if that's even a word). No legs, no wings, no beak. I had failed.

This all came back to me yesterday as I nearly killed a couple of baby birds whose mother had made a nest atop one of the pillars on our front porch. A neighbor mentioned to my mom that sometimes a snake will come out of the woods, climb up the pillar, and eat the birds. Thinking I'd move the nest before the bird had a chance to lay eggs in it, I went out with a broom serve my eviction notice.

I began by banging the broom against the pillar to see if a bird would fly out. It did not. I did it a few more times waiting to hear any small chirps of fear. There were none. So I carefully scooped the nest down onto the flat side of the broom bristles and set it in the yard. And that's when I heard it.

A small chirp.

I went and grabbed a pair of gardening gloves and tried to sort through the collection of grass and twigs - hoping to find nothing. Of course, though, I did. A tiny bird - with a coat of brown and black fuzz on its back - jumped from the crumpled nest and hid beneath a small clump of grass. I jumped back and called out a few choice words. I had really hoped I wasn't going to find anything in that nest.

About this time the mother came back and, not aware of what had happened, perched atop the pillar with a worm hanging out of her mouth. She had come back to feed her baby and found her entire home and family missing. I felt terrible. Uncomfortable by our presence she flew up to the roof of the house to try to make sense of what was happening.

With the help of my mom and the two boys I scooped the nest into a small plastic cereal bowl (to keep it together) and then went about trying to catch the baby bird in a dustpan. I wasn't sure if it was true that if you touch a baby bird with your hands its mother will abandon it but I wasn't willing to risk it. After many attempts (in which it jumped out of the dustpan) I finally got the baby bird into its nest. However, just as I placed it back on top of the pillar the bird jumped out of the nest and took a nosedive in the small crack between the house and the pillar. I used a small stick to slide it out and then put it back into its nest. At that point we all ran inside not wanting to know what would happen next. There was nothing else we could do.

When I woke up this morning, after listening to the many storms roll in and out through the night, I looked out the front window to see if the nest was still up there. It was. Within a few moments the mother bird came swooping in with a worm in her mouth and hopped up into the nest.

It worked.

The mother bird is on the left warning me to not to do this again!