A Goodbye

Nature can show its beauty and its cruelty in equal measures. Tom was watching a nest of baby birds, and we thought they had a chance to make it. She found them killed yesterday, all pulled from their nest most likely by another bird. At the same time, I found a fledgling out of the nest obviously too early. All the research we did said to leave them alone, that their mother will know where they are, and will scramble around and care for them. Not the case with this little guy. After finding him again on the second day, weak and wobbly, we caught him, placed him in a box with straw for a bed, and fed him a thin gruel of watery cat food through an eye dropper. I thought he looked like he was rallying a little bit, but when I went to check on him last evening, he was still, and gone.

I am probably too sensitive. Little critters like this die all the time here. But we wanted to give this little guy a fighting chance. So I buried him out past the garden, placed pine and fir cones, a pine bough, and a knot of a pine tree over the ground. And as a close to “Sky Week,” a flat gray sky, filled with other birds flying below it.