Full House!

For years, we hosed mud, twigs, leaf bits and bird from the column in the carport where she liked to build her nest, up against the wall and protected from wind, weather, dog and cat, but not from human beings who didn't like the mess she made.  We sprayed the nest daily, hourly, obsessively, to keep her from building, rebuilding, rebuilding and rebuilding.  We ended up each summer with a mass of debris at the base of the column, but at last, angry and triumphant, no bird, no nest, no eggs, no babies.

This year, finally, for no particular reason (age, compassion, laziness, despair), we relented.  She made her nest in peace and returned to find it whole, not in wet and dribbling pieces.  I use the pronoun because I have yet to determine what kind of bird we're talking about here.  Some say she is a swallow, but I don't think so.   She has a pale yellow breast, a tuft at the back of her head (or he does, perhaps), and not a forked, or an especially long tail.

Then she disappeared.  We thought she had abandoned the nest.   The column was too high for us to see if she had laid any eggs.  We waited.   One day we found part of an eggshell on the driveway.  We saw a little movement above the sides of the nest.  The mother came back.  The father came back.  They perched on the laundry line, on the edge of the roof, in the branches of the trees across the driveway, leaving white streaks of droppings on the blacktop as they flew back and forth to feed their chicks.  Three chicks who, two weeks later, are climbing all over each other in the nest and flapping their wings, or sitting together, hearts beating, two of them facing out, the other facing in.

We're watching, expecting them to fledge any day.  Hoping they won't fall.  Expecting them to fly away.  We feel like, I believe the expression is, empty-nesters!

Meantime, we discovered in the outdoor shower room we use for storage that another bird of another breed unknown to me has tunneled a nest into the pine straw that filled an overturned terra cotta pot.  We found it because one day, when we opened the door, the bird darted past us!   Peering into the tunnel, one day we saw eggs, one day we saw three tiny bodies that looked like slugs, then the slugs grew feathers, beaks and faces, we could see their three hearts beating.  Now we haven't seen the mother bird for days and days, once again we think she's gone for good and the babies not moving, but, indeed, they seem to be growing, eyes open now, and in different positions each time we go to look.  We're keeping the cat inside.  We're hopeful the chicks will survive.

Not to mention the babe in the nest on the column at the end of the terrace outside our bedroom, a beak and a ball of fluff I can see if I stand on the two-step ladder.

And to think we deprived ourselves of this anxiety and adventure for all those years!  City folk finding our way into the country.