Her Majesty

In late afternoon yesterday, I prepared to take our household trash to the disposal station north of us. I gathered the bags and went outside to load them, and I noticed a large bird’s nest on the ground beneath the weeping willow tree. The day had been gusty and the wind had taken the intricate structure down. I started to just ignore it for the time being, but that curious little voice inside me urged me to go look at the nest. There might be eggs inside, said the voice.

So I went to the nest, marveling as I always do at the workmanship and careful design a bird can employ with twigs and string and mud, and turned it over. There were no eggs inside, but there were three small birds there, covered with down and the beginnings of pin feathers. Robins. I looked closely, thinking them dead, and saw that all three were still alive, breathing and trembling and opening their beaks. The matter of the household trash was forgotten. I hurried back inside and got a hand towel, returned to the birds, and placed them in the towel. I found a basket and put our heating pad in it, turned it on low, and tucked the baby birds into this improvised nest.

Next, I sought my wife’s advice. Keep the babies in the house? Try to feed them with a syringe, with what? Mashed up earthworms? Broth? Mrs. Orr consulted a friend of hers, who is something of a rescue-the-baby-birds expert, having done this work of mercy many times. The friend advised that I try to get the nest back into the tree if at all possible, being careful to wear gloves against mites and lice, and to put the birds back into it. She allayed my fears that the mother robin would reject the babies since I’d handled them. “That’s an old wives tale,” she reassured us. “The mother will definitely care for them if they’re in the nest. She will find them.”

I went to the door and looked outside. There was a robin sitting on the branch near where the nest had been attached. She was calling out in that staccato berk! berk! berk! that my grandmother taught me so many years ago. I was certain that this was the mama bird and that she was calling for her babies.

I fastened two large zip-ties together and lashed the nest securely in the crook of a stout branch jutting from the trunk, then came back to the house and fetched the birds. I carefully placed them into the nest and returned to the house. And then I watched.

Very shortly afterwards, two robins, a male and a female, appeared beneath the tree and hopped around, plucking at worms and peering up into the tree branches, clearly looking and listening for the babies. I checked again after a while and the mama bird was perched atop the little ones, her wings mantling them from the drizzle that had started up.

And I watched her sitting there, a stoic little winged beauty, doing her duty as she was created to do, needing no guidebook nor guru, obeying the ancient instinct to protect her young and help them to thrive, and I loved her in that moment, loved her with a deep and placid love.

She is sitting on the nest as I write these words, her head turning, her bright eyes examining the yard. Her mate is in the grass nearby, and he comes to her frequently with food for the young, and perhaps for her, too. She sits there in her majesty, in her regal role as mother, and I think she is wiser than most of the young women I see in the world around me today.

Can a small bird and her clutch of trembling, cheeping offspring give a man hope? Yes, I think she can. I think she already has. I know the mama robin and her babies will leave the tree and our farm at some point, under circumstances I have no way of knowing. But for now she is here, and she is a balm to my heart, in her motherly majesty, in her tender care, in her relentless protection of her own kind. Here is wisdom. Here is beauty.

~ S.K. Orr