I saw him one last time this morning, before closing the back door and heading off to work, the little Gentleman in the Red Waistcoat, sitting in the apple tree, but that remote friendly relationship has passed. We were both too wrapped up in our own thoughts.
He and Mrs Robin, the Lady in the Red Bib, the same ones I think as last year, had built a nest in one of the lower eaves in the back of the house. They waited until we were away to do this, and we only noticed when coming back from holiday and had put the patio furniture out to do this, you could have sat a metre away and not seen the nest. The first clue was the crumpled , shrunken corpse under one of the chairs where the first one had flown the nest too early; ambition outstripping ability. I quietly buried it in the pet graveyard by the pond with my watery children.
Stupid as it seems, we felt we had made friends, my wife and I, with those little red-breasted, hard-working parents. My wife left little treats out and we sat there silently, watching the Gentleman in the Red Waistcoat rummaging for worms by the log pile and bobbing and chirruping from the top of the gazebo. The Lady in the Red Bib chasing Mr Sparrow and his innumerable cousins away from the wormiest parts of the garden. They were always there, checking on how near we were, and we in turn made extravagant attempts at being still, to look unthreatening.
Does familiarity breed curiosity as well as anything else? They started following us around the garden and sitting on the deck watching us through the window of the boudoir , washing fussily in the pond and I caught myself giving them the time of day in an exaggerated fashion whenever I saw them.
But last night we heard the insistent cheeps of the surviving robin-child after watching the bobbing and chirruping of one of the parents in the setting sun, and I heard a disturbance in the jasmine to my left. It had launched itself from the nest above my head and was struggling at the top of the waist-high pot.
We grabbed the Mighty Predator, washed, warm and stuffed with the choicest of cuts and fled indoors with her, before I put on a rubber glove (all those childhood injunctions about handling Nature’s young and leaving your alien scent leading to parental rejection in my head) and crept back out to try and put it back in its nest. It fluttered away at my approach, down behind the pot plants lining the kitchen wall and disappeared. I stood there in a fit of indecision and then knelt down, stiff legs complaining and joints popping to peer in behind, but it had fled.
Wordlessly that evening, we took turns at the hall or bedroom window, listening to the parent’s frantic chirpings as the sun went down. My wife thinks she saw them on the edge of the decking, the parents trying to encourage the small one to fly, but then darkness and silence.
I got up early this morning to go out in the garden, hunting for signs of survival. Or worse. The nest was empty, and the garden showed no small, bedraggled corpse or cheeping refugee, so I can only hope that instinct took over and the little bugger has flown off to safety. I looked at the empty nest, moss, grass and the odd twig and swallowed a lump in my throat, the redness of Nature being brought home in a small bundle of feathers and black, lively eyes before turning my back on a friend.
It’s curious how we have been drawn into this small tragedy.
4-JUL-2019
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