We came back from vacation earlier this month to find that someone else had moved in. I didn’t realize it at first—the house seemed just as we had left it, and we were busy emptying the car and starting the laundry and repopulating the house with the things we’d taken with us.
It was later, when two of the boys were in the bathtub, that I saw piles of bird poop around the floor in the dining room. The dining room is a small space underneath a greenhouse window, and it’s always attracted birds. I froze, wondering if I’d find a bird huddled in the corner. When I didn’t hear anything, I started looking around for a dead bird. I wanted to find it before the kids did. Their toys are in this greenhouse room, too, and I imagined the unhappy surprise of finding a still, small creature when you’re reaching for a wooden train track.
I crouched down to look closer. And that’s when I saw the tiny white ball beneath the table.
I hoped it was a ball. Honestly, it could have been a ball—we’d borrowed a friend’s bingo set, and even though we’d given back the cage full of balls, they kept appearing around the house: I-29, B-4. I worked at a summer camp where we played bingo every Monday night, and I couldn’t help coming up with things to say about the number: I-29, oh how I wish I were 29. B-4, brush your teeth be-four you go to bed. This was the same camp we’d just returned from, a place that’s layered with memories of my childhood, my college years, and now my sons’ childhoods. One of them visited several times before he was even born, when he was the very smallest of growing things.
But the white ball. Seeing it took my breath away, because I knew what it was even though I didn’t want to. An egg. Of course it was an egg.
I didn’t want to touch it. I am probably not a good candidate for backyard chickens, because eggs always make me slightly nervous. I worry I will drop them, I wash my hands after cracking them, and if I overcook them and have to scrape them into the trash, I feel awful—wasting an egg seems worse than burning a piece of toast. Each one seems so precious, its own little world.
I also knew I couldn’t leave it there, where it would get trampled or eaten by our dog. I didn’t think it would hatch, but still, the idea of our dog eating it made me really sad, for both the bird and the dog, even though it’s likely that neither of them would have thought much of it. And my oldest son, the one who hadn’t gotten home yet, would be upset, too; he sometimes worried about eggs and birds in the house the way I did. He was getting a ride home from a neighbor friend, eight hours down from the mountains. Suddenly he seemed very small, hurtling through the state in an oversized pickup truck.
So I showed the egg to my husband, who looked around the dining room again. Then he spotted it—a nest that was on top of the mechanism that opens the greenhouse window. Later, he learned from some guys who’d been working in the yard that they’d heard banging and wild chirping inside, and peeled back a window shade to see three birds inside.
He put the egg in the nest, and put the nest outside, nearby the greenhouse, tucked on top of a light. It’s still there. I haven’t looked at it, because it makes me sad. Had the bird intended to lay her egg on the ground, or did she somehow miss the nest, or know this one would not grow, so hid it away?
From the outside, the egg itself was beautiful, perfect, a tiny jewel. A friend sent me a link to a bird identification website, and it’s pretty clear to me that it was a mourning dove; the eggs the same size and shape, the note that the birds are “unbothered by nesting around humans” and that they may nest in eaves, gutters, abandoned equipment.
I’m sure our house did seem abandoned. I have the same kind of sadness around houses standing empty as I did about the egg, sitting on the floor. What use are they, if not filled with life? I know that these things make space for other things to move in, but it’s hard to be in the between time, when something has left but nothing has moved in to take its place.
Then my kids got out of the bath, my husband kindly cleaned up the bird poop, and my oldest son opened the front door. The house seemed full again—fuller, maybe, because something about it had been home, for a short time, to something more than just us.
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Bonus: Here’s a poem I really like about eggs.
Image by Retrofresh! via Flickr/Creative Commons
So beautiful!
As a consulting scientist, I work from home and have the pleasure of watching birds nest in and around our yard – especially active ever since the coyotes took our cat away. The mockingbirds hide their nests well and are fiercely protective of the area. Driving off marauding crows many times their size without a second thought. The hummers patch together bits of dryer lint and downy feathers into small, impossibly soft cups of life. But the mourning doves … these have got to be some of the dumbest birds around. They build exposed, poorly meshed nests which are not defended from the crows. Often we find bits of egg on the back patio underneath scraggly bits of grass piled between the slats of the patio cover. The eggs just drop right through to the pavement below. Clearly evolution has a little work to do with these birds. And yet, somehow they survive.
This is lovely. As an animal rescuer I am always amazed that doves are so successful . . .they will lay their eggs anywhere. After noticing a dove on a fence post for a couple of days I check and find an egg. A chick dies in a dove nest and mom builds another nest on top and lays again. Yet in the morning my tiny valley is filled with dove coos . . .as loud as any freeway traffic when I lived in the city.
The last line couldn’t be more perfect
Melancholy yet powerful post. Mourning doves are my favorite and their song illicit the same feelings in me as did your post.
Thank you! Dr D, I will now look at mourning doves in a whole new way–actually, it makes me feel a little better that it might not totally be our fault for having such a dumb window setup.