Today has been a rather lovely puffy cloud day. The robins are out cavorting all over my garden beds. I think the worms must be stirring under all my mulch or something. The first year we lived here, after a very, very long winter, a robin clunked into our kitchen window on March 21. He was fine and flew off, but I’ve always thought it was sort of symbolic to have a robin inform us that it was, in fact, finally spring.
The arrival of the robins means that soon we will have the inevitable robin nesting failures around our house. I think the term "bird brain" might have been coined by someone who witnessed a robin attempting to build a nest in a place that clearly couldn’t support it. We live in a log house, and almost every year, some robin gets the brilliant idea to try and build a nest on a particular piece of log that sticks out about 6 inches under the eaves. This little nook is where the roof meets the top set of logs on our house, so only about a quarter of the log is available for a nest.
The bad news is that the robin has gravity working against him. But every year, a tremendous nesting project ensues with the robin attempting to balance little twigs and moss on this small curved surface area. The problem is that a quarter of a log is basically not flat enough to support anything, and the moss and twigs inevitably fall off.
So we end up with a pile of moss and twigs below. Robins are nothing if not persistent and determined. You would think that after the first 400 times the moss falls on the ground, Mister Robin might decide "okay, maybe one of those trees (of which there are MANY) might be a good alternative." Or maybe the 20 acres of forest behind them. But no.
Spring is in the air, so it’s only a matter of time before this year’s robin gets a brilliant idea. "Hey, look at that spot under the eaves. That looks promising. Maybe some mud will make the nest stick. Oops. Darn. Well, maybe THIS time it will work. Oops…"