We returned from a two-day vacation to find baby bluebirds in the yard. My husband and I quickly counted chicks, hoping they all survived the transition from nesting box to life on the wing.
Impossible to track, the little gray birds fluttered like drunken bats from the deck railing to the grass, then skittered dangerously beneath the parked car as their parents hopped behind offering insects.
Three weeks earlier, I had counted six eggs, then five hatchlings. Suddenly we were down to two. Later, when I opened the nesting box, I found one dead chick lying inside. Who knows what happened to the others – coyotes, dogs, hawks. Life in the wild is a crap shoot, I know. Only the strongest survive.
Still, I sympathized with the bluebird parents I had watched tirelessly feeding their brood, and guarding their box from persistent swallows who ignored the “no vacancy” sign.
Every March, a bluebird pair returns to the nesting box in our front yard. One gray snowy day, I looked out the window to see six bluebirds in the aspen tree – the entire family back from their Texas winter. I later read it was more likely a flock of males scouting for nesting sites, but at the time, I believed I was seeing old friends. And spring couldn’t be far away.
The bluebirds’ soft calls and flutters have come to mean summer to us. Never far away, they perch on the railings of our covered deck, or rooftop. We watch them helicopter- hover above the sagebrush flats, then swoop down to snatch a choice grub. And we eagerly follow the babies’ progress from eggs to fledglings until they learn to survive on their own.
My 5-year-old daughter calls them “her bluebirds,” after Cinderella’s benevolent friends in the animated Disney movie. The female sometimes perches on the roof overlooking the trampoline as the kids launch themselves into the air. She must think they are trying to fly.
That evening, as I removed the dead chick from the box, I considered showing it to the kids. We could bury it in the backyard. But in the end, I didn’t.
The death felt too private to share.
I built this bluebird box with my grandfather long before I moved to Colorado and had a family of my own. I don’t know how the idea got started. I had recently quit my job, and moved back home to the Midwest from a foreign country.
During the week, instead of looking for another job, my grandfather and I worked in his garage with his well-used tools. He was a retired dentist, teacher and lifelong carpenter who loved birds and trees, and believed in doing things right. So he patiently taught me Carpentry 101 while my grandmother kept a pot of coffee warm for our frequent breaks.
At the dining room table, we talked about my grandparents’ years in Puerto Rico, or the catfish Great Uncle Jake used to pull out of the Blue River.
These were stories my grandparents had been telling me all my life, but I was finally old enough to listen. There I was, surrounded by the noises of my childhood – the lazy hum of the refrigerator kicking on, the loud creak of the deep freeze door opening, and the ticking of the grandfather clock (appropriately built by my own great-grandfather), which never kept the right time.
Only two years later, my grandfather died. By that time, I had married and was living in a wide-open Colorado mountain valley – the perfect habitat for bluebirds. The boxes my grandfather and I built were for eastern bluebirds, but their rugged mountain cousins don’t seem to mind.
Eventually the female bluebird laid five more eggs, ready to raise a second brood. If no one had removed the dead bird from the box, I wonder how they would have managed – whether they would abandon the box altogether.
And I was thankful for the chance to do this one small thing for them.
I have been surprised by the things in life that take on a purpose greater than you imagined. And how the people you have lost come back to you again and again in ways you couldn’t have known.
Gretchen Bergen (gretchenbergen@yahoo.com) is a freelance writer.
