Oh, the irony of it all

Last spring, we noticed that a young couple had taken up residence—uninvited—in our house. We thought about considering them squatters and calling the police to have them removed or else charging them rent for sharing our space. But in the end, we just kicked them out and moved out their “crib” when they started having babies, which was the last straw.

Yes, a pair of birds had built a nest in a small space tucked under the aluminum awning that covers our front porch (yet another reason to hate it besides its aesthetic qualities). We hadn’t discovered the nest until it was almost too late–when they had already laid a few eggs in it. We agonized a bit over what to do, but in the end, we decided they could not stay, so I moved their nest down to the ground, which essentially meant an end to that year’s hatchings. I continued to feel guilty, like I had performed an abortion on several baby birds.

Soon after this, Sarah covered the area with some netting. We thought we had solved the problem and were sitting pretty as this year’s spring wore on. Then, a few weeks ago, even as the sweltering summer weather had begun, I noticed one day as I was leaving the house through the front door that a bird had started to collect a pile of grass in this space, even behind the netting! As I came and went, I observed what was happening for a few days and discovered that a bird had managed to squeeze itself up through the awning into this space. I feared the worst again—that there were already eggs in it, that it was already a complete nest that was incubating new life. I tried denying it for a few more days, but I finally hoisted myself up high enough to see that, indeed, there were already five eggs there. As I observed the bird at other times during the day, I could see that she was truly sitting on these eggs to warm them. Even keeping the porch light on all night did not seem to bother her. I told Sarah about this, who was equally dismayed, but when Lexi heard, she was curious and even a little delighted.

We had hoped to avoid all of this by giving Lexi a birdie house, as she called it, for Christmas and hanging it in a visible spot in the back yard well in time for young bird couples looking for a new house to start a family. But no birds had taken residence in this new house, but they had chosen to return to their old spot (if it was the same family from last year), even if it had meant they needed to work extra hard to occupy the space.

Our struggle with what to do with this nest of eggs is even harder this year because of one irony: Not only is the young bird couple outside our door pregnant, but so is the human couple who lives inside the house. This spring and early summer, we find that we are both expecting babies. Do we want to become killers of babies again of some smaller, helpless creatures in an effort to keep our front porch clear of bird poop and other waste from a whole family of birds? Would we want some larger, more powerful creature terminating our pregnancy? Is there a difference between baby birds and a baby human? We’re not sure what to do. We’ve been trying to find a place in our yard where this year we could move the nest of eggs to allow them to hatch safely rather than letting them die before they hatch. But so far we haven’t found one, and we know well how babies’ due dates keep approaching. In the meantime, however, as I spy on that mother bird warming her eggs in that nest, she makes me feel guilty for wanting her out of that spot because I see my own wife incubating our own baby and knowing how much we will love this child.