Spring is proceeding apace in this yard, despite my worst fears. For 28 of the 29 years that my husband and I have lived in this house, the elderly widow next door mostly shared our commitment to a natural yard. And because her house backed up to a little patch of woods, too, between us we managed to create a miniature wildlife sanctuary. I could sit outside in springtime and hold very still while a tufted titmouse pulled hairs from my head and carried them to her nest in the yard next door.
After my neighbor’s death last year, a backhoe demolished the house and nearly all the old trees along with it. I worried about what would happen to the birds now that so many nesting sites were gone.
In most ways, it’s been a glorious spring anyway, despite the ceaseless hammering next door. The spring beauties and woodland violets are nearly bloomed out now, but already other flowers have taken their place. It will be this way till frost.
And yet, all spring, our yard has been bereft of nests. By mid-April we would normally have bluebirds in the nest box in the front yard, chickadees in at least one of the boxes in the side yards, and Carolina wrens in the pots hanging from the eaves out back (or, last year, in the bag where I keep my clothespins). There’s almost always a robin nest in the cherry tree, a mockingbird nest in the holly beside the driveway, and a cardinal nest in one of the foundation plants.
One year a pair of cardinals nested in a shrub so close to the house it brushed our bedroom window. I left the curtains closed to keep from bothering the birds, but every now and then I would poke the lens of my camera through the crack where the curtains came together. In that way I watched the female sit patiently on her eggs through cold nights and spring rains. I was watching, too, when both babies took their first flight.
Most songbird nests are miracles of architecture and engineering. A mourning dove is a sloppy engineer, but nearly everybody else goes to great lengths to create the perfect nursery. Bluebirds weave pine straw into a shallow cup so perfect you would swear opposable thumbs were involved. Carolina wrens build elaborate domed nests embellished with skeletonized leaves.
My favorite backyard nest-builder may be the tufted titmouse, who braves the wrath of all manner of mammals to pluck out their fur for nest-lining. Can you imagine a titmouse, weighing less than an ounce, daring to gather nest materials from the living bodies of raccoons, opossums, dogs, squirrels, groundhogs and essayists? And yet they do. For the sake of the young they hope to raise safely, they do.
This year there were no nests, at least no obvious ones. I saw a pair of house finches chasing a cowbird out of the yard once, which may mean there’s a house finch nest nearby, though I haven’t noticed it. And back in mid-February, a pair of bluebirds seemed to be making plans to move into the front-yard box but ultimately decided against it. I finally checked the box last week and found it inhabited by an ant colony. They were house ants, who pose no risk to baby birds, but perhaps bluebirds can’t tell the difference between native house ants and invasive fire ants, which are widespread in the South. Whatever the reason, no ant-occupied nest box in this yard has ever been chosen by house-hunting birds.
Fortunately, it’s easy to get ants to move their own nest. I opened the box, let the light in, and left them alone long enough to move their eggs to a new site. In this place where developers keep mowing down trees, and tree services keep ruthlessly pruning deadwood, cavity-nesters have little to work with. I figured the birds would be back within days.
So far, no luck, but I was happy that the Carolina chickadees were also nowhere to be found. Chickadees, who live here year-round, get a head start on nest building, but house wrens, who spend the winter much farther south, will destroy any chickadee nest they find in territory they’ve claimed for their own. And in recent years they have claimed this yard. To persuade the chickadees to nest somewhere else, I never cleaned last year’s wren nests out of the boxes.
I thought my plan was working. House wrens construct their nests from sticks, and all three of our chickadee boxes still had sticks poking out the bottom. Once, I did see a chickadee emerging from the nest box hanging in the rose arbor, but the sticks told me all was well. Chickadees in this yard have always built their nests out of moss.
Then, last week, I heard the unmistakable courtship song of a house wren. I can’t help rooting for the chickadees, it’s true, but I also can’t bear the thought of house wrens trying to raise their young in a dirty box colonized by ants or mites. It was time to remove the old nests.
The first box held only the sticks from last year’s nest. The second box held an old house wren nest and also a house ant nest. The third box, the one high in the rose arbor, held a mossy chickadee nest, carefully built on top of last year’s house wren nest. When I opened the box, the brooding female shot out the door. I peeked inside. A tiny bald nestling raised its head and gaped at me.
Installing a nest box comes with certain responsibilities. A natural cavity is part of a natural system, but a nest box is a human contrivance, one that sticks out like a sore thumb in a world of soft borders and dappled light. A human being who installs a nest box is obliged to make every effort to keep it safe. During nesting season, I check my boxes every few days to be sure they haven’t been taken over by wasps or mites, or to remove any dead chicks. It’s even possible to install a wren guard on certain styles of nest boxes, though ours are not among them. I might need to replace all my chickadee boxes next year, and move them to new places in the yard, too.
I have not heard the house wren singing since the day he arrived. He may have kept flying north. Even so, I won’t be checking the chickadee nest again. Right now it is somewhat camouflaged by leafy rose canes, and I don’t want curious wren eyes to follow me and my ladder right to where it is hidden. I won’t know how those baby birds are faring unless I see the remnants of a mossy nest caught in the rose thorns.
That uncertainty, the knowing of a very few things in the context of all the things I cannot know, is inevitably the way of things in this yard, and nearly everywhere else, too. Are my nest boxes compensating for the loss of natural tree cavities in a city in the grip of convulsive growth? Or are they merely luring defenseless birds to nest in dangerous places?
I don’t know the answer to this question, and I may never know it. All I know is that there are baby birds in my yard again at last. And, God help me, I will never cease rejoicing.
Margaret Renkl is the author of the books “The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year,” “Graceland, at Last” and “Late Migrations.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times.