I love walking in early spring. The avian construction crews are out in force. You can hear them from first light until dusk. They work in teams of two, consulting and sometimes squabbling about building sites and quality of materials. The sparrows build condominiums in a single tree, and a pair of red-wing blackbirds create a fork to support their architectural opus by incorporating the tops of adjoining tall grass stems from last year or this year’s marsh-willow stems into the walls. High sturdy forks in the old oak and maple trees hold huge edifices of large sticks. Some of those were built in previous years, and need only to be restored and relined with dead grass to provide a safe home for young red-tailed hawks and other feathered hunters.
I can see all this activity and industry and its results because the foliage is still very new. The leaves are just unfurling, and they’re tiny. The grasses are just starting to sprout, and while they’ll be four feet tall by the time the blackbird nestlings hatch out, the dry remains of last year’s grass doesn’t conceal much, at least if I’m looking. So when a small brown chirpy swoops down and grabs a clump of grey fur I’ve combed out of Sophia’s coat, I can see it as it bobs and flutters to a landing in a mulberry tree and carefully tucks its treasure into a tiny cup of woven twigs. It kind of tickles me that huntress’s shed fur will keep the next generation of her prey warm, but that is the nature of things.
The feathered housing boom will go on a little longer, but pretty soon now it will give way to maintenance and then the full-time job of feeding those gaping little beaks. I’ll be watching that too, now that I know where the nests are. It’s a good thing those little bird-brains don’t have room to pay attention to anything but the task at hand, or they might get very annoyed at my invasion of their privacy.