A few days ago, Kindra walked out of the house and saw the sad sight of a dead baby bird on the sidewalk.
She immediately suspected it was one of the two baby wrens from the nest in her Purple Heart plant on the porch, so she peered into the nest, scaring the bejeebers out of the remaining baby and confirming that, yes, one was missing.
You may recall that Kindra was watering her outdoor plants a few days ago and turned the hose onto the Purple Heart plant, flushing a small brown bird.
It was a wren, as identified by Google and confirmed by Internet photos of adult wrens and their nests.
We discovered that Wren Tin Tin had laid three eggs the size of malted milk balls in the nest and two of them eventually hatched.
Kindra has kept close tabs on the baby birds and their gaping little yellow mouths and would fret any time their mother left the nest to collect food.
We still don’t know why the baby bird died and why it was 15 feet away from the nest, but I wondered if it might have had something to do with the stray white cat that was sitting on the lawn mower a few days earlier.
I mentioned the cat to Kindra and remarked that it was an unkempt character who appeared to be of low estate and capable of plucking a baby bird out of its nest.
Kindra had read once that cats dislike citrus, so I came home that afternoon to find an arc of oranges around the Purple Heart plant, much like the protective spell the Scottish wizards cast around Nessie.
The other bird survives as of this writing, so it is possible that Operation Orange was a success and sent the cat slinking into woods to wipe its eyes and repent of its sins.
Or, maybe the cat was innocent and the baby bird had merely tried to fly too soon, gave itself a concussion on the concrete and expired. Either way, I am happy we still have one baby
Either way, I am happy we still have one baby wren in the nest on the porch.
Our associations with Nature enrich our lives - in this case especially, since yonder baby wren is potentially worth two in the bush - so we are better for the birds being there.
I’m hopeful that the little one survives and we can sit on the porch in coming years and watch our very own home-raised wren flit around the yard.