In spring, I used to search for nests. I would part the branches of shrubs and low-limbed trees, peering into their depths for a clump of sticks and string and shredded plastic—the messy structure of a mockingbird’s nest. I would squat and look upward for a cardinal’s tidy brown bowl. I scanned the ivy climbing the bricks, searching for a hammock tucked into the leaves by house finches. I checked the hanging fern for the vortex tunnel built by a Carolina wren. I watched at my window for blue jays flying into and out of the tree canopy and tried to pinpoint the exact Y-crook in the branches where they’d hidden their young.
For ten years, this was my faithful nesting-season ritual because our little dog, Betty, a feist mix, was hell on fledglings. In her leaping, tree-climbing youth, I took down my feeders and emptied my birdbath, determined not to invite songbirds into the yard. They nested here anyway, perhaps because our lot backs up to a patch of sheltering woods, perhaps because birds will nest more or less anywhere.
I couldn’t keep Betty in the house all spring and summer, but I could certainly keep her inside during the few days when new fliers are most vulnerable. But to do that I needed to know when the babies were likely to leave the nest, and to know that I needed to find the nests and keep watch over them. If I knew the species of bird on the nest, and I knew the day her eggs hatched, I could make a good guess about when her young would fledge.
The problem with knowing something is that I cannot unknow it. Knowing there are two eggs in the redbird nest means knowing not only an approximate fledge date for the redbird babies but also exactly how many eggs the rat snake ate between yesterday afternoon, when I checked on the mama bird, and this morning, when I found her nest empty. The loss you don’t know about is no less a loss, but it costs you nothing and so it causes you no pain.
Human beings are storytelling creatures, craning to see the crumpled metal in the closed-off highway lane, working from the moment the traffic slows to construct a narrative from what’s left behind. But our tales, even the most tragic ones, hinge on specificity. The story of one drowned Syrian boy washed up in the surf keeps us awake at night with grief. The story of four million refugees streaming out of Syria seems more like a math problem.
The grief of the failed nest echoes in an entirely different register, but it is still a grief. In Tennessee it’s common for cardinals to nest twice in a season, hatching between two and five eggs each time, but few of their young will survive. The world is not large enough to contain so many cardinals, and predators must eat, too, and feed their own young. It should not trouble me to know the sharp-eyed crow will feed its babies with any hatchlings it steals from the cardinals, but I have watched day after day as the careful redbird constructed a sturdy nest in the laurel, and I have calculated how many days and nights she has sat upon those eggs, how many trips she has made to the nest to feed the babies, how many times she has sheltered them through a downpour. Day after day after day.
After Betty died, I stopped checking my yard for nests in springtime, but my eyes are tuned now to the signs of nesting—to the male blue jay feeding the female on the limb just past my deck, to the tufted titmouse plucking loose fur from my surviving dog’s haunches as he sleeps in the sun, to the chickadee gathering moss from the deepest shade at the back of the yard. And I can’t unsee the nests they build.
It’s wrongheaded to interfere in nature when something is neither unnatural nor likely to upset the natural order. I can’t help myself. A crow lands too close to the redbird nest, and I rush outside with my broom. A red wasp chases a brooding bluebird from the nest box, and I rub soap into the wood of the birdhouse roof. It’s humiliating, all the ways I’ve interfered.
In recent weeks I’ve watched a pair of Carolina chickadees building a nest in the bluebird box outside my office window. When a bluebird arrived and tried to evict them, I stood outside in the pouring rain and put up another nest box a few yards away. The bluebird gave it no notice, but he stopped pestering the chickadees, and all seemed well. Then a house wren showed up.
One year a wren killed a chickadee nestling on my watch, so when I heard the unmistakable trilling of a house wren calling for a mate, I looked reflexively toward the bluebird box where the chickadee was sitting on five speckled eggs. There was the brown wren, a feathered fusion of music and violence, perched right on the roof of the birdhouse and singing a song that could only be a territorial claim. The new nest box, empty and pristine, was ten paces away, but that one didn’t interest him. I got up from my desk, went outside, and walked straight toward him until he flew away.
Two days later the chickadee was gone, her nest empty, and I watched from the window as two male bluebirds fought over the box, leaping into the air and knocking each other to the ground. In the underbrush at the edge of the yard, the wren was still singing.