After winning a bluebird house as a door prize and listening to the bluebird people speak about how important it is to check your bluebird houses EVERY week, I checked a bluebird house. I have three houses up and I checked the one outside the kitchen window. I've seen bluebirds and house wrens coming and going out of there. The bluebird speaker stressed how important it was to check the bluebird house every week. Otherwise, he said, you're just providing food for raccoons. He wanted us to throw out eggs from other species or kill sparrow or starling fledglings if we found them. I don't think I could kill a baby bird. Experts at the purple martin festival suggested gathering them in a bread bag and stepping on them or spraying some starter fluid in the bag. Ai yi yi. I can't even eat frozen chicken breasts. I really don't think I want to kill an innocent baby bird. Anyway, I checked the blue bird house. The nail hadn't come out of there in about 15 years and it was really stuck. I pulled and pulled. The bluebird house rocked back and forth with my efforts. After ten minutes of struggle I got the door open. I saw a nest in there. I was glad the house wren hadn't filled it up with little twigs. Some debris was stuck to the door and I scraped that off. I cleaned off the top of the nest. Eventually I saw what I took to be a dead body in the nest. I gently brushed it off with the blade of my screwdriver when the dead body moved and settled itself back into the nest. I saw a fledgling with blue feathers. It was alive! I was disturbing a baby bluebird. "AAAAk," I said to the little bird, "So sorry for disturbing you." I shut the door and put the nail back in. My heart was pounding. Now, why did I do that again? What is the point of checking those boxes every week? Checking the nests goes against everything I've heard all my life about leaving baby birds alone. But the bluebird expert said to do it. And he gets 5 or 6 fledglings out of every nest so I guess he knows what he is talking about. Bluebirds, unlike some other species, tolerate human handling. It's not true that the parent bird can smell human on a baby. Only vultures can smell. And some birds eat skunk so that pretty much proves they can't smell very well. As soon as I calm down, I might go check the other two bluebird houses. I can only take so much excitement in one day.
On a completely different topic, June 28 is the third anniversary of the beginning of this blog. This is the 1, 188th post. I've written almost once a day for three years. I've enjoyed writing for "Orange is My Favorite Color." The first post was June 28, 1997 and I wrote:
I want this to be a way for me to keep in touch with my friends and family. I hope
this will be a place to make and strengthen connections. I hope this blog will
make you laugh or snicker or roll your eyes or nod your head in agreement.
I believe the blog has kept me in touch with friends and family. I think I have made and strengthened connections. Have I made you laugh? Have I made you snicker? Have I made you roll your eyes? Have I made you nod your head in agreement? I hope so.
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