Last week I told you about a stubborn robin that pecked at my bathroom window, defending a nest that didn’t exist against a foe that also didn’t exist. Well, that false-heroic bird finally declared victory and moved on — probably to the golf course to waste still more time pretending to be a winner in another meaningless exercise.
Well, now I have a different pair of stubborn birds taking the stage just outside my breakfast-nook window. But unlike that delusional robin, these birds are true go-getters, experts at getting things done.
Their nest is in a giant gourd I bought a few years ago at an art fair in Barrington—a bulbous basketball-sized gooseneck gourd that just cried out to go home with me. With its neck and head curved gracefully over its back, I thought it would look great on the porch next to a few pumpkins.
So that’s where it sat until after Thanksgiving, when I wondered what to do with it next. Would it keep over the winter, or would it just rot and make a mess? I decided to take a chance with it on the workbench in the garage, where cleanup would be easy if everything went bad.
By spring the following year, the gourd had dried as light as a feather, bleached from dark green to a sort of sand-colored patina. And although a crack had formed across the bottom, I decided that it might make a good birdhouse. I had just the spot to hang it — a clematis trellis just outside the window where I eat breakfast each day.
And with any luck, it might attract my favorite birds of the garden — the little house wrens, with their lilting song and friendly demeanor.
I went to work, drilling a wren-sized entry hole exactly one inch in diameter, then yanked the dried “guts” out of the gourd with a long needle-nose pliers. I looped the neck of the goose-gourd over a metal bar of the trellis just outside the window, and then I waited.
I wasn’t disappointed. Within a couple days, a handsome male wren showed up, shuffled in and out of the gourd with the beginnings of a nest, and then sat atop the curved gooseneck, singing out his resume as a good catch for some lucky lady wren.
I’ll spare you the salacious wren-wrangling details I witnessed from my breakfast table over the next several days, but within a few weeks I watched this little wren family grow from a happy couple to a feathery suburban family of six. Mom and Dad worked endlessly gathering worms and beetles for their tykes to eat.
It was a bittersweet day when those babies flew the coop, but I felt glad for Mom and Dad, who were surely exhausted from their constant labors raising the chicks. I wished them a calmer, quieter summer ahead.
So imagine my surprise when, a week later, the whole thing started all over again. I couldn’t tell if it was the same couple of wrens canoodling just outside my window, but by the start of July another gang of gangly chicks goggled out the gourd-hole to see where all those snacks came from that Mom and Dad provided all day long.
When that second flock flew off, that was it for last summer’s hatchings. In October I cleaned the old nesting material out of the gourd with the long needle-nose and left it to hang through the winter so this year’s wrens could get an early start.
But to my surprise, this spring a pair of sparrows shouldered the wrens aside and decided to claim the gourd for their own. They pecked the opening much larger so they could fit, and by the start of May, they took occupancy right there outside my breakfast window. If they had any hint of the irony that I was gobbling eggs while they were laying theirs, they never let on.
It’s July now, and not only did those two sparrows raise a family of chicks and send them out into the world in early June, but they (or a second pair) moved right in and did the same thing. They begat and raised another five young sparrows, who just sailed away into the garden a week ago.
So by my calculations, at least 20 baby birds have been birthed and dispersed in that goosy gourd over the last two summers.
“So that’s it for this year,” I thought. Deciding to get an early start on my seasonal clean-up, I went to work with that old needle-nosed pliers and pulled an astounding skein of nesting material through the front door of the basketball-sized gourd after a double-round of sparrow spawning. If it had been wool, I could have knitted a cardigan.
I hung the empty goosy gourd back on the trellis, glad to have at least one seasonal clean-up duty finished already.
I’d like to tell you that that is the end of this story, but it isn’t, because as I write these words a third pair of sparrows are doing unspeakable things to each other on the trellis. Between rounds of their debauchery, they gather new nest-material and stuff it into the gourd.
And so, on and on it goes for the third time this season, and for who knows how much longer? Don’t they ever get tired of cuddling and re-furnishing the old homestead? After fully raising two families, shouldn’t they be planning their retirement to Florida by now?
Robins. Wrens. Sparrows. Between the obsessive window-whacking and baby-booming, who knows what goes on inside a bird’s brain?
All I know is that two birds in the gourd are worth a flock in the bush.
TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com
