Knight
I open the door carefully and peek along the wall to the white wicker table where the plants sit. Either I will catch a glimpse of the little brown bird or I won’t. If she knows I am there, she will flutter low and away from the porch. If she does not appear, she is either nestled in the plants or out gathering food. This is the standard scouting procedure Becky and I have been using when leaving the house. Mostly though, we have avoided the issue by using another door to go outside.
For the last few weeks, we have been running a BB&B — bird bed and breakfast — on our front porch. Knowing Becky likes to take care of plants, and perhaps wanting to preserve some memories of her dad, our neighbor Kelly offered Becky a flower arrangement from her father’s funeral. Becky separated individual plants and put two of the larger ones in a nice pot. She put that pot on the front porch wicker table. And now we ponder how this plant, an acknowledgment of someone’s passing, has turned into a shelter for new life.
We try not to peek into the foliage, but it is hard to resist. Early on, Becky saw four or five pinkish eggs—not sure of the count because she didn’t want to linger. We looked again another evening and saw tiny heads and beaks grouped together. We quickly backed away. Though the adult birds didn’t swoop in to protect the nest, it’s likely they were aware of what was happening.
It took us a while to identify the species of our guests. We could see that they were small and mostly brownish. We pulled our go-to identification book, Birds of Indiana, off the shelf and narrowed our guess down to a couple of different wrens. It was difficult to get a good long look at the birds because they tend to flit away, and my eyesight isn’t what it used to be — which never was that great.
Then one Sunday morning, we saw one perched on the iron hook holding the hummingbird feeder. It stayed long enough for both of us to get a close look through binoculars. A light-colored chest and prominent white eye stripes were visible. They must be Carolina Wrens, we decided.
Sources tell us the male and female Carolina Wrens essentially mate for life. They both build the nest and take turns feeding the brood. One book explains both males and females sing, often resulting in duets. This knowledge makes us smile.
Becky and I like to be outside and we look forward to spending time relaxing on the front porch. It has been clear our family-building guests are uncomfortable when we hang around. We don’t want to cause them any distress, so one pleasant afternoon we carried her wicker rocker and my chair out on the lawn and sat in them under some shade trees. It was quite nice, and we commented on how pleasant it was to get another perspective of our front yard.
According to our bird information, Carolina Wrens can take several weeks to go from first building a nest to abandoning it. We can wait. It seems right to us to let nature take its course in producing and sustaining an abundance of offspring.
Jesus says in the Book of Matthew, “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them falls to the ground outside your Father’s care.” All birds, Sparrows and Carolina Wrens seem the same to me. Life — the great goal of nature — is the precious commodity here. Maybe a small brood of wrens is not all that significant in the great scheme of things.
But maybe it is.
Norman Knight, a retired Clark-Pleasant Middle School teacher, writes this weekly column for the Daily Journal. Send comments to [email protected].
