A robin blasted past my head when I neared my mailbox, landed on a branch of a nearby tree and directed a series of complaints at me. It was late in May, and I realized that I had been strafed on a daily basis for about a week. I glanced from the tree to the roofline of the house from which it had fled, and saw, in the snarl of black wiring tacked to the house beneath the white elbow of the building’s downspout, a small gray mound of twigs. A nest, I mused: must be baby bird time. I wondered why the bird, with access to all the mighty trees of the neighborhood, would choose to build a nest over a doorway.
Earlier that week I had chatted with my downstairs neighbor, the person with whom my friend, “The Cat Below,” resides. She told me that she had been trying to monitor Ravi’s movements because she had found a baby bird in the yard, and she did not want Ravi to harm it. I left later in May, and by then, the robin was firmly ensconced in the nest, sitting and waiting.
I went to spend a week with my grandchildren in Dover, Maine. The house that was rented had three large bedrooms, enough for my two grandbeauties, their parents and two grandparents. When we were checking in, I saw, for the first time, barn swallows. Their mud and stick nests were packed above the external fire extinguishers that protruded from the walls of the condo. The birds would swoop at me when I came too close while trying to photograph them, but I discovered that the nest they were building was on the covered patio off the bedroom where my daughter and son-in-love slept. Before the week was out, my granddaughter and I could sit quietly on the patio, and watch the birds, who sat grumpily on the fence railing, waiting for us to go away. I told my granddaughter that swallows were “air feeders,” but she insisted on breaking bread into crumbs and lining the rail with them, hoping to feed them.
The barn swallows, unlike the robin, were working as a pair to build the nest; it was still empty by the time we left Maine. Back in Indianapolis, I found, in the nest above the doorway, two fat baby robins. The mother was now more vocal as I passed her nest, “chipping” at me from the tree. I wondered how it was possible that the two birds even fit into the nest, but within a week, one bird was standing above the other, on the rim of the nest. A few days later, only one fuzzy head was visible in the nest, and then it was time for me to fly away to Clearwater Springs, Florida.
After visiting Tarpon Springs, Fla., to watch two sea turtles being released back into the sea, my friend and I stopped for lunch at one of her favorite eateries. As we crossed the parking lot, I heard the cry of a bird. I looked up, and atop the light pole, in the center of a great growth of sticks and twigs, sat a baby osprey. This baby was monstrous by comparison to the robins I had seen at home. And when I returned to Indy, I looked for the last of the baby robins and found the nest empty. I imagined that my nest trilogy was empty, and that the mothers had all done the work of life: The babies of three nests are now in the world.