Life With Ferris: Watching The Nest

I’ve had an empty nest for almost two decades now. I’m used to sleeping through the night uninterrupted, not laying down the law constantly, and rarely gearing up for battles I’ve chosen. I’m happy with my current grocery bill after feeding three growing boys.

To fill my golden years with joy, Vivienne and David Nichols gave me a bluebird house a few years ago. We set it up in the back yard, and the bluebirds came! We watched the parents come and go from our porch and were delighted! Then, we had torrential rains and found the baby bluebirds dead.

Devastated, I cleaned the birdhouse, readying it for another clutch. I learned we need to monitor the bluebirds closely, which seems counterintuitive. I hate to open the little door and disturb them. What if the mother flies away never to return, or what if the babies panic and try to fledge too soon?

This past Mothers Day, my husband gave me another bluebird house for the front yard, along with a Blink camera. Diane Shelly with the Chattanooga Bluebird Society set up the birdhouse, which actually has a tiny shelf built especially for the Blink camera. She helped me set up the camera, too.

Days later, there were five pale blue eggs in the nest, plain as day, on my cell phone. The next thing I knew, the eggs were gone, not a shard of the sky blue shells in sight. But there was a squiggly, squirming mass in the bottom of the nest. It took a while, but as I zoomed in, I made out what was five baby somethings.

All of a sudden, there were only two! And they didn’t look too good at all. Like, they couldn’t be described as birds in any sense. Several flavors of chewed gum mixed together? Entrails?

A few days later, my husband found one of them in the yard, dead. Blink confirmed only one left in the nest.

I was beside myself. I asked for help on the Chattanooga Bluebird Society’s Facebook page and was reassured it was not my fault. But I was bereft. And obsessed.

The little surviving bluebird soon looked like it could be a bird. It sprouted feathers, and its beak was wide open most of the time. The mother bird was back and forth, back and forth, feeding the little one, then plopping her plump feathered self right on top of her baby!

Wringing my hands, I worried about the feeding schedule and whether it was too hot in the birdhouse. The little thing seemed listless and I was concerned about dehydration. As the days went on and the little bird totally turned into a miniature bird, I stopped worrying that it was dead, but instead worried about the whereabouts of the mother bird. She stopped tucking her baby in and staying in the nest with it. She barely could be bothered to feed it! One night she didn’t even come home!

My husband couldn’t watch a movie in peace because the Blink camera went off every few seconds and I refused to silence it, no matter how riveting “Your Honor” was on TV.

"We are on high alert!” I snapped when he suggested I turn off my phone. “I don’t know where she is!”

“The mother bird knows better than you! Stay away from that birdhouse!” he warned.

The baby bird stressed our marriage. Fully feathered and looking like a tiny version of the mother bird, the little thing scrambled around the nest as I watched from my office on my phone. Sure it was about to fledge, I called my husband and told him to run outside to video it. I was completely certain of the fledging every 10-15 minutes, and by the end of the day, I imagine my husband no longer even turned his head to look out the window.

Turns out, the little thing few off without fanfare. No one saw it leave the nest. The nest was empty and I was told to clean it out immediately in hopes another pair of bluebirds claim it for their babies.

I had an empty nest for five days … and then a bluebird swooped in with a piece of pine straw. And now there are four baby blue eggs and one fully charged Blink camera on high alert.

Postscript: All four eggs hatched and all four fledged!

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Ferris Robinson is the author of three children’s books, “The Queen Who Banished Bugs,” “The Queen Who Accidentally Banished Birds,” and “Call Me Arthropod” in her pollinator series “If Bugs Are Banished.” “Making Arrangements” is her first novel. “Dogs and Love - Stories of Fidelity” is a collection of true tales about man’s best friend. Her website is ferrisrobinson.com and you can download a free pollinator poster there. She is the editor of The Lookout Mountain Mirror and The Signal Mountain Mirror.