Nesting

Look at this cool nest I found over the weekend. It was lying on the grass under an old apple tree in our yard. It’s so tiny that I’m not sure what bird made and used it—maybe a hummingbird or chickadee—we have both. Guess I need to buy one of those bird nest identification books to add to our reference collection.



And I noticed that my cats are spending quite a lot of time sitting in the window that looks out over the lilac bush at the corner of the house. There’s a nest of baby robins right in the middle of it. It seems kind of late for babies but there are three. With wide open beaks that mom spends all her time trying to fill. This is endlessly fascinating to my cats and, I have to admit, to me, too.



One of the things I love best about living in the country is how close you can get to nature. That’s sometimes not so much fun when it’s a nest of yellowjackets or the deer that thinks my garden is her personal salad bar. But I love that I can hear coyotes running in the woods at night, and that the same broad-winged hawks return every spring and raise their babies here. I feel lucky to be witness to the cycles of life that occur all around me.

Edited to say that I now believe this is a Chipping Sparrow nest. I was at a used book store recently and paged through the pictures in a book on nests and that's my best guess. They are fairly small birds, too, and we probably have more of them than any other kind.