Birds At Home

Standing on a short ladder, I reached up to the top of the downspout–where it bends just under the gutter–and unceremoniously pushed the now-empty robin’s nest off its perch. It sailed to the ground, and landed with a soft thud.

I reached down to pick it up, intending to carry it back into our woods so it could return to the earth, and noticed how solid it felt it my hand. I examined it carefully, turning it over and over. It had suffered no discernible damage from its fall. And it was beautiful.

Through the years I have been caught up short by many of the wonders of nature’s works. But two days ago that perfect home for hatching and raising a new generation of robins struck me as one of the most magnificent of those wonders. It is perfect. It is strong and solid, but light-weight; woven tight, but soft.

How do robins know how to do that?

Season after season robins construct who-knows-how-many nests, most of them never seen by any human being. And now I held one of them in my hand, and it was, it is own way, as magnificent as the Alaskan mountains and glaciers we saw just a couple of weeks ago. And I, being human, almost swept it away without a thought.

Around the corner of our house, not far from the robin’s nest, we hang a wren house. At least a dozen–maybe more–generations of wrens have been hatched there, and we take special joy in watching for them each year. One (a male, I’ve read) claims the house first, builds a nest, and then sings for a mate. When he finally attracts the perfect partner, they work together to produce and nurture the new chicks. When they are feeding them the parents fly all day for days to and from the evergreens behind our house, feeding the hungry children until they fledge. One day they are all there; the next they are all gone. We rarely see the leave-taking.

This year’s wren nesting seemed as if it would never get off the ground. No one showed up until late June, and he (as I understand it) sang for weeks with no apparent success. Finally, just before we left on July 30 to be away for more than two weeks, a second wren did show up. We figured we’d miss whatever was to happen next.

The same day that I removed the robin’s nest I peered into the wren house through its entrance. Yes, there was a nest in there. But there had been no activity since we’d come home, and I figured the nesting was done. I took the house down and opened it to clean it out. The jumble of twigs and grass that wrens use to make their nest cradled two tiny, dead birds, just beginning to show their feathers. Some tragedy had befallen our wren family. It had been a difficult season for them from beginning to end.

It may be time for a new wren house. I want to offer these little birds we so enjoy watching and hearing the best home that I can. I could never build a nest the way birds do, but I do like to help them when possible. Their success and mine are interwoven as intricately as the grasses in that robin’s nest. Their intelligence and skill are different than any I possess. Sometimes I think it is equal to mine.

Nature’s results are never 100% what we think they ought to be, or even what they need to be for success. In this, as in perhaps every way, human beings are just like everything else. It’s pretty humbling. Awesome, even.

ABOUT THOSE STATUES...

ABOUT THOSE STATUES…

I have been reading and thinking quite a bit about the “Confederate Statues” controversy, and offer the following thoughts:

(Be advised, I am a “northerner,” so my views may reflect some geocentric bias.)

1. The conversation is helpful to me personally. For as long as I can remember I have felt ambivalent about these memorials; now I recognize why.

2. One possible solution: contextualize the statues historically by placing a similar-sized statue of a slave in chains next to each one of them. Doing this will preserve the history that many today claim they do not want to lose. Slavery is, after all, what they were fighting to preserve. An explanatory plaque would be a cheaper, but less effective, alternative.

(I know that some argue that the Civil War was not about slavery, but slavery was the intractable problem that led to everything else associated with the war.)

3. Another solution: move all the statues to museums that teach the history not only of the war itself, but of the century that followed it. Or maybe move them to battlefields or Civil War cemeteries, such as Gettysburg and Johnson’s Island, where they really can serve a historic purpose. My understanding is that many of them were put up decades after the war, as much to bolster the legalized racism practiced in most of the south in the early 20th century as to honor particular soldiers. These statues do not need to be displayed in places of honor in order to be useful, though I am not sure how much instructional value most of them actually have.

(I am wary of destroying history’s artifacts when they make us uncomfortable. Second only to the crimes against people perpetrated by Isis has been its destruction of historically significant works of art in the ancient world. Isis’s fundamental contempt for human culture and history is a crime against us all.)

(I am also wary of angry crowds taking it upon themselves to pull down and destroy statues. Mob action is a highly risky last resort, maybe.)

4. The Governor of Maine compared the destruction of Confederate statues to the possible destruction of 9/11 memorials? Really? That’s bizarre.

5. Speaking of history: weren’t these Confederate Generals traitors? Didn’t they participate in an armed rebellion against the country of their birth and to which many of them must have sworn allegiance when they signed on as soldiers and officers in the US Army? (Robert E. Lee, chief among them.) To have allowed them to go back home to take up their lives again after the war was one thing. To honor and celebrate them is quite another. What Americans would want to do that 150+ years after the last shots were fired?

6, in which I answer the question I posed in the final sentence of #5: Americans who long for another rebellion against the United States of America, that’s who would want to honor and celebrate those rebels; Americans armed to the teeth because they think the only way to save their country and their way of life is by violence; Americans who wear Nazi symbols and who wave Confederate flags because they want their convictions to become our fears.

7. Where else on earth would any government tolerate for a moment, much less for a century and a half, the near veneration of those who had taken up arms against it, leading to uncountable loss of lives and properties, for a cause–chattel slavery–that history has judged to be absolutely evil? We are such a complex amalgam of competing passions!